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Some 

Aspects of International 

Christianity 



BY 
JOHN KELMAN 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 




v\* 






Copyright, 1920, by 
GEORGE R. GROSE 



AUG -2 1320 ' 



©CI.A571862 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Foreword vii 

Preface ix 

I Rededication 1 

II The Relation of Christianity to 

Patriotism 30 

III Individual and National Morality 61 

IV A League of Nations .... 93 

V Statesmanship in Foreign Mission- 
ary Work 125 

VI Britain to America . . . . . 146 



FOREWORD 

The following lectures will meet a real and 
widespread need. They will contribute to a 
clearer understanding of the obligations of a 
true internationalism and of the strength of 
vital Christianity. The author, a preacher of 
international repute, speaks as a discriminating 
student of human affairs and with the moral 
authority of a Hebrew prophet. The convic- 
tion that the Christian religion is the only 
solution of the complex and baffling problems 
of the day, and that it has to do mightily 
with all the world movements is tremendously 
strengthened by these lectures. 

The Mendenhall Lectures of DePauw Uni- 
versity, to which this series of addresses be- 
longs, was founded by the Rev. Marmaduke 
H. Mendenhall, D.D., of the North Indiana 
Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. 
The object of the donor was " to found a 
perpetual lectureship on the evidences of the 
divine origin of Christianity and the inspiration 
and authority of the Holy Scriptures. The 
lecturers must be persons of high and wide 
repute, of broad and varied scholarship, who 
firmly adhere to the evangelical system of 
Christian faith. The selection of lecturers may 

vii 



viii FOREWORD 

be made from the world of Christian scholar- 
ship, without regard to denominational divi- 
sions. Each course of lectures is to be published 
in book form by an eminent publishing house 
and sold at cost to the faculty and students of 
the university." 

Lectures previously published : 

1913, The Bible and Life, Edwin Holt Hughes. 

1914, The Literary Primacy of the Bible, 
George Peck Eckman. 

1917, Understanding the Scriptures, Francis 
John McConnell. 

1918, Religion and War, William H. P. 
Faunce. 

Geokge R. Grose. 
President DePauw University. 



PREFACE 

While I was preparing my course of Lyman 
Beecher Lectures, which were delivered at Yale 
in the spring of this year, I received an 
invitation to give six lectures on the relation 
of Christianity to International Subjects, in 
DePauw University, Indiana. At first I felt 
that the task was beyond me. I am no ex- 
pert either in politics or economics. The time 
at my disposal was extremely limited, and 
much of it was already arranged for. Yet on 
second thought I resolved to accept the invita- 
tion with which DePauw had honored me. 
There are questions of the most vital impor- 
tance on which every man must form an opinion. 
The bearings of these questions are not con- 
fined to the regions of expert knowledge, and 
there is a place for the impressions of the 
man on the street — his general sense of moral 
values, his common sense view of relative im- 
portances, and the free play of his conscience 
upon the questions of the hour as he understands 
them. It is in his name and from his point of 
view that I have prepared these lectures. 

They were delivered from fragmentary notes, 
and the form they took owed much to the 
wonderful kindness and hospitality of the 

ix 



x PREFACE 

audiences. I shall never forget the thrill of 
those evenings in DePauw, when the response 
was so immediate and so inspiring, and the 
most abstract discussions seemed to change 
to personal confidences, given and received. 
But when it came to writing out the book in 
cold blood, and without the inspiration of the 
friendly atmosphere of the lecture hall, the 
task assumed a far more formidable aspect. 
It had to be performed amid the confusion and 
distractions involved in my removal from 
Edinburgh to New York, and without access 
to many books of reference which in other 
circumstances I would have consulted. 

Meanwhile, the political and international 
situation was changing from day to day, with 
the rapidity of a mountain torrent, and an 
opinion might be antiquated almost before the 
ink in which it was written had dried. In 
view of all this, I must trust to the indulgence 
of the reader, in the hope that he will find in 
the little volume at least some reminders of a 
very stirring time, and that the general argu- 
ment and point of view may be applicable 
still, even when the detail of their application 
may have changed. 

Some of the subjects of these Lectures have 
already been dealt with in the Lyman Beecher 
Lectures, though in slightly different form. 
Several of the present series were delivered also 



PREFACE xi 

at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio, 
and the friends who heard them there, as well 
as the congregation of Fifth Avenue Presby- 
terian Church, where they were delivered dur- 
ing the present winter, will permit me to asso- 
ciate them with those in DePauw as I thank 
them all for the welcome they accorded me — 
a welcome so cordial and so generous that it 
has been a permanent enrichment to my life. 

John Kelman. 

New York, March, 1920. 



CHAPTER I 

Rededication 

Before the war had ended there had already 
come upon the conscience of earnest men in 
every land a sense that the future life into 
which peace would lead us must not be identi- 
cal with, or even very similar to, that to which 
we had been accustomed in former days. The 
Great War has been so searching, and has 
penetrated so thoroughly into every nook and 
corner of human interest and enterprise, that 
it must have wrought very serious changes 
in many of the aspects of life. Now that the 
peace has come, we find ourselves bewildered 
by the number of elements, expected and un- 
expected, which are entering into the recon- 
struction of society. 

In Edinburgh during the spring of last year 
there was inaugurated in the churches a move- 
ment called the Mission of Rededication. 
That Mission, which created considerable inter- 
est, dealt with many different questions, not 
religious only, but political, social, and eco- 
nomic, and it has left results both in the teach- 
ing and in the practice of men. The word Re- 
dedication is striking and very provocative of 
thought. It at once puts us into the line of 

l 



2 SOME ASPECTS OF 

history, and reminds us that this is by no means 
the first dedication that has been attempted. 
Casting one's eye along the line of the past, 
one sees the great historical dedications of Israel 
in the Wilderness, Solomon's Temple, the out- 
set of the Crusades, the Wars of the Covenant- 
ers, Plymouth Rock and the James River, the 
American Revolution, and the Great War. 
In all of these men felt that there had come 
upon them a new sense of life's solemn and 
commanding opportunities, and in each particu- 
lar case they dedicated themselves to some 
specific task. Now, however, there is a wide- 
spread feeling that things are farther on than 
they were on any of these former occasions, 
and that there is a greater living chance, if 
only we may be able to avail ourselves of it, 
for changing things forever. The final end of 
war has actually seemed to be in sight, and 
some of us have not yet lost the vision of it, 
nor the faith that that vision may be realized. 
The new world arising out of the ashes of the 
old will undoubtedly have cleared itself of many 
hampering conditions, and there seems to be an 
actual prospect of realizing many of these also. 
When one views the League of Nations in its 
widest scope, which is, indeed, the only complete 
or understanding view to take of it, one feels 
overwhelmed by the stretch of its idealism, and 
can hardly believe that we have come to the 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 3 

point of attempting to arrange for and organize 
so mighty an affair. 

Yet so it is. This generation cannot shift 
its responsibilities without losing altogether 
the solemn sense of historical unity. Our 
dead lie upon every battlefield, and behind them 
the vast company of the dead of other wars, 
and of all the other men and women who, in 
their generation, strove to realize ideals which 
had revealed themselves to them. There is in 
Edinburgh a legend of the ancient Castle, 
that a bugler blowing the " last post " ona 
wild and stormy 31st of March, centuries ago, 
was killed there and thrown down the rocks; 
and the legend tells that every 31st of March 
those that have ears to hear can hear the sound 
of a fifth bugle, whose notes linger long over 
the sleeping city. The dead bugler comes back 
to continue his challenge to living men. When 
we remember the dead it is well ever to remind 
ourselves that they without us cannot be made 
perfect, and that they are waiting in their 
silent places to"see how we shall take up their 
unfinished work, and what we shall make of it. 

It is altogether fitting, therefore, that at 
such a time as this we should bring out into 
clear light all that is most sacred in our lives, 
our minds, and hearts, and dedicate it anew to 
high ends for future days. In doing this we 
are able with peculiar vividness to realize the 



4 SOME ASPECTS OF 

unity of history and to see our own efforts and 
ideals in a higher light because of what they 
have meant in days gone by. 

With all this in our minds we come to the 
great taskf of the rededication of our own lives. 
Again we remember that this is not the first 
time of dedication. We have all been dedi- 
cated before; indeed, so far as our personal 
religious history is concerned, we have been 
dedicated far too often. When we turned 
consciously and deliberately to God, at the 
first celebration of the Communion, or on the 
occasion of the death of friends very greatly 
beloved, we have all undergone several such 
experiences, and about each of them there has 
always been a sense of conscience accusing us 
of unfaithfulness to former dedications. Had 
the early dedication of our lives been complete 
and deep enough, we would not have had so 
far to travel back in order to renew our vows. 
It is right at such a time as this that we should 
very particularly consider the reasons for the 
failure of former dedications in so far as they 
have failed. We shall probably all find that 
there are two main reasons for those failures. 

The first of these is that our dedicated things 
were left lying stored and inoperative. We set 
aside certain purposes and memories, and 
solemnly laid them on the altars of our spirit, 
and then turned back from that sacramental 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 5 

act to a life in which the dedicated things were 
to a large extent forgotten. Such dedication 
is conceived of too much as static rather than 
dynamic. It represents a judgment rather 
than a purpose, an emotion rather than a vital 
impulse. It is laid aside reverently in the 
region of dogma, instead of being led out into 
the field of living experience. 

The second reason for such failure is that 
often our dedications are too general, and 
therefore meaningless. They express a real 
desire to be better men and women, whose 
spirits are more faithful to the highest things, 
but they do not particularize what these things 
are, nor examine what practical points of con- 
duct are involved. In a word, they lack point, 
and in all that concerns conduct that is a 
fatal lack. Now the War has put point upon 
everything. It has forced us all back from 
generalities to that which is concrete and 
definite. Our aspirations in such former experi- 
ences were often little more than excellent 
copy-book sentiments to which, of course, we 
assented, but which never entered the region 
of practical conduct. Now we feel ourselves 
seized as it were by the throat, and as we seek 
another dedication an imperious voice demands 
of us, " What exactly do you mean? " It is 
necessary for us now to examine all our convic- 
tions and principles, in order that we may 



6 SOME ASPECTS OF 

ascertain of them also what their exact meaning 
is. If our dedication is to be a mere generality 
to-day, we simply court a repetition of former 
disappointments. The solemn moment will 
leave us unprepared for any advance in the 
future, and when we come to face the pressing 
questions that will be on us before we know, 
we shall find ourselves, mentally and spiritually, 
" all over the place.' ' 

Before we state to ourselves definitely the 
meaning of our dedication it will be well for us 
to go to the root of the matter, and ask what we 
mean by the word " dedication " itself. It is a 
great word, which we are accustomed to utter 
with reverence. How noble it seems ! How 
little it often signifies ! Come, let us bring it 
to a point. What is the " dedicated spirit," 
and what does it involve? 

Obviously, in the first place, it must involve 
limitation. In young days we all have passed 
through a stage in which we understood the 
words of Robert Browning in Pauline : 

" 1 am made up of an intensest life, 
... a principle of restlessness 
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all." 

It is not long, however, in the case of all who 
are dirigible in the course of life, before we learn 
that this radiant vision is but the figment of 
young enthusiasm. It is not given to mortals 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 7 

to enter fully into every phase of life, and we 
soon discover that we cannot know everything, 
nor feel, nor think, nor do everything either. 
The first requisite for a satisfactory dedication, 
then, is to select something which we shall 
know and think and feel and do. In other 
words, to mark out our province. 

Here we touch upon the vexed question of 
the two rival ideals for education. The uni- 
versity education of older days, prescribing its 
fixed number of subjects identically the same 
for all students, has been replaced by the 
modern arrangement of optional courses in 
which each student specializes along some par- 
ticular chosen lines. The danger of the new 
plan is that you may easily produce by it un- 
educated experts, people who know their own 
narrow business thoroughly, but who do not 
know it in relation to the wider world. Such 
uncultured specialization is a real danger which 
must be guarded against at the present time. 
But, on the other hand, we have reached a 
period in the world's history when mere broad 
culture is not sufficient to meet the demands of 
the day. Life is asking us all certain very def- 
inite questions, and it is incumbent upon every 
one who would serve his generation rightly to 
select for himself some limited area in which he 
chooses to specialize, and to which he dedi- 
cates his powers of intellect and action. This 



8 SOME ASPECTS OF 

holds good in the choice of a profession, a choice 
which will be facing many of you very soon, 
if it has not confronted you already. There 
are all sorts of reasons which present them- 
selves to a young man or woman in favor of or 
against this profession or that, and it is here 
that one of the great dangers in education 
arises. One will choose a profession because it 
appears to him more honorable, or more re- 
spectable socially, or more likely to provide 
him with quick returns in money than another. 
Another will take for the principle of choice 
the extreme opposite of this, and sensitive 
consciences have been often tempted to settle 
the big choices of life upon the principle that 
one should always choose the more self-denying 
or strenuous course. These principles of deci- 
sion are equally misleading. When thinking 
of the dedication of a life, neither social position, 
nor money, nor self-denial are questions of first 
importance. The great question is that of 
efficiency as it applies to the particular nature 
of the person deciding. What can you do best? 
What does your habit of mind lead you toward 
doing? That will be your best contribution to 
the public welfare, and that should be the prin- 
ciple of*your choice. In a later lecture we shall 
revert to this. 

A similar snare lies set for the feet of every 
earnest spirit, in the promiscuous desire of 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 9 

doing good. We want to help and bless our 
fellow men, and we have not realized that it is 
possible for none of us to do good to everybody. 
The result is often a life broken into frag- 
ments of good endeavor, and scattered over 
innumerable small attempts which neither link 
on with one another into any concerted whole, 
nor, indeed, achieve any completeness even 
along their own various lines. Again it is 
necessary to mark out your province, by select- 
ing those whom life has given you as the sub- 
jects of your special service. In a word, clear 
up the matter of your possibilities and your 
limits, and then work within these limits with 
all your might. Find out what you stand for, 
and stand for that. This is the first great law 
of dedication. 

In this there is already involved the second 
consideration, namely, originality. We all de- 
sire to be original, but some try to be so in 
very curious fashions. One of the commonest 
of these fashions at the present time is that of 
achieving originality by contradicting obvious 
and proved truths. I need not remind you 
that anyone can do that without any great 
display of genius or much expenditure of effort; 
but I would like to point out to you that a 
considerable amount of what passes for genius 
and brilliancy in current literature, upon analy- 
sis turns out to be little better than the exercise 



10 SOME ASPECTS OF 

of this smart trick. Originality does not consist 
in differing from others, but in thinking things 
out for yourself. It matters little whether 
you agree with others or differ from them. 
Every truth that passes through your own 
personality, and goes out upon the world from 
you, will have something of that personality 
communicated to it and lingering in it. The 
great thing is that you should refuse the tyranny 
of fashion and the habit of thinking through 
other men's minds. " Ye are bought with a 
price, be not the slaves of men." The price 
has been bitter and costly in the lives of your 
comrades. At least answer it by shaking your- 
selves free, that you may stand independent 
and think for yourselves. Dedicate your life, 
not only to certain projects that you wish to 
accomplish but to that point of view which is 
distinctively your own, and to that set of con- 
victions which you have found to dominate 
your conscience. In a word, find out what you 
stand for and stand for that. 

Let us now ask what this means in four 
different departments of our life and interest : 

1. Personal Religion 

In this the new dedication will, on the one 
hand, link each of us in with the historic Chris- 
tian faith, and on the other hand it will discover 
for us what our individual aspect of Christian- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 11 

ity must be. These two are well embodied 
in that interesting word sacramentum. Famil- 
iarized to us in its English form of sacrament, 
it has a history of peculiar suggestiveness. In 
classical Latin it meant the military oath sworn 
by the soldier that he would be faithful to the 
Roman army and empire; but when it was 
taken over into the early Latin of the Church it 
assumed the new meaning of a mystery, the 
disclosure of hidden spiritual realities within 
or along with visible and tangible things of 
sense. In our partaking of the sacrament both 
these meanings are implied, and in all dedica- 
tions of the spiritual life each of them is present. 

On the one hand such a dedication neces- 
sarily involves the great loyalties. The faith 
of the fathers and the saints has a claim upon 
every dedicated spirit, and in our dedication we 
link ourselves on to that holy succession. ' ' What 
they believed, I believe; what they hoped, I 
hope : whither they are arrived, by Thy grace, I 
trust I shall come." In these great words of 
Thomas a Kempis he has handed on to us a splen- 
did formula for the expression of the supreme 
loyalties involved in all Christian dedication. 

Yet, on the other hand, this dedication is 
one's own, and a man expects to perceive hidden 
mysteries which no one else can see as he sees 
them, but whose vision is always more or less 
determined by his own spiritual powers as well 



12 SOME ASPECTS OF 

as by his personal qualities and experience. 
Thus, even in the matter of belief we cannot 
hope to retain all the details of the creed of those 
fathers and saints who have gone before us. 
In the swift changes of thought which ac- 
company the development of the times, and 
which new learning must always necessarily 
produce, it is necessary that the statement 
and interpretation of Christian truth should be 
elastic enough to assume the necessary changes 
of form. We cannot dedicate ourselves to a 
point of view which was possible only to those 
who accepted the scientific and critical con- 
ceptions of, say, the fourteenth century or the 
fifth. The Christianity which claims us is 
that upon which the light of to-day is beating; 
and our testimony, while it will always revere 
the great testimonies of the past, cannot pos- 
sibly be in all details identical with any of 
them. As a matter of fact, there will be in a 
man's dedication to-day a double element. 
If it be as solemn and comprehending a thing 
as it ought to be, he will revere much that he 
does not literally believe ; but, at the same time, 
he will have discovered a central core of living 
beliefs which mean absolutely everything to 
him. I remember passing through the vesti- 
bule of a large and richly built hotel much 
frequented by business men. In that vestibule, 
among many palms and other beautiful plants, 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 13 

there was a collection of fine white marble 
statuary. The statues were reproductions for 
the most part of ancient Greek ones, and it 
was amusing to notice how these men, in a 
general sense prizing the beauty and the change 
from ordinary pursuits which the statues of 
that vestibule afforded them, yet passed out 
and in, busy upon a few vital interests of their 
own, not in the remotest degree connected with 
art of any kind. Such a vestibule is the entire 
creed of some men, crowded with fair but alien 
forms. It offers a bosky retreat for the spirit, 
but it has no connection with any vital interest 
of life. Doubtless in the creed of all men there 
will be such a vestibule, but the imperative 
thing is to discover what part of its beauty and 
its ideas are really vital to the life and thought 
of each one of us, and then to count that and 
that alone our living creed, to which we dedi- 
cate our lives. In some, this living core of 
faith still remains considerable in extent; in 
others it has been reduced to an extremely 
small number of statements. This central 
faith, found not now from dogma but in experi- 
ence, and accepted without reserve, is at least 
enough for a man to live by. 

2. The Church 

Next to personal religion in a day of dedi- 
cation there must recur to all loyal spirits 



14 SOME ASPECTS OF 

the thought of that organized expression of the 
Christian faith represented for them by the 
church with which they have been connected. 
The present time is one which should quicken 
all our church loyalties, and recall us to the 
greater thoughts of church life which have 
commanded the imagination of so many genera- 
tions. It is a common saying that the Church 
has failed, and that the War has finally pub- 
lished that failure to the world. I have spoken 
elsewhere about this measureless fallacy, and 
I need not repeat the repudiation of a thing 
so obviously untrue. The church to-day is 
greater than she ever was before, and she re- 
tains all those possibilities of spiritual reality 
and effectiveness which led the apostle of old 
to call her by the sublime name of the Body of 
Christ. That body is immortal and has the 
power of rising many times from the tomb. 
It may be buried, as it has been buried time 
and again, in the earth of formality and super- 
stition and the ambitions of ecclesiastical men ; 
but it will always rise again in some form or 
other from the dead, with new powers for meet- 
ing the exigencies of a new day. Indeed, the 
church is like that temple of Philse which stood 
for many centuries on its island in the Nile, 
and to which pilgrims came from all quarters 
of the land to pray to the river god for floods 
and harvests. It stands there still, but it is 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 15 

now submerged. The raising of the waters by 
the great dam at Assouan has permanently 
and abundantly fulfilled the prayers that were 
offered there, and the temple has passed away 
in the fullness of the answer to its own prayers. 
So will it be with the Church of Christ. Those 
benefits to humanity for which the church 
stood long ago, in days when there was no 
other institution which could supply them, 
have been in many instances taken over by 
other agencies, and to that extent the church 
has ceased to be required. As in these in- 
stances she has been submerged in the fuller 
supply of her own gifts, so it may be that in 
the end all those spiritual blessings that she 
has brought to the earth will be supplied in 
fuller measure, and they that see the City of 
God will see no temple therein. But that day 
is still far ahead, and while man's need remains 
unsatisfied and his thirst unslaked, the church 
will ever stand upon the earth for the supply of 
the water of life. 

While we thus disclaim the accusation that 
the church has failed or that it is going to fail, 
let us be candid in regard to those things which 
have suggested such a view to hostile critics. 
Two things especially need such attention. 

(1) Denominationalism. In this respect the 
experience of the War has done a great deal 
toward rectifying erroneous impressions and 



16 SOME ASPECTS OF 

undue emphasis. Some men went out to the 
front with very strong convictions as to the 
exclusive validity of their own orders, and many 
others brought to their new experiences extraor- 
dinarily strong prejudices in favor of their 
own denomination. At the front they were 
drawn close together, and discovered, in men 
belonging to different churches from their own, 
high spiritual gifts and an obviously valid 
power of ministry and call to it. They saw 
such men at their work and felt the reality and 
effectiveness of much that they had formerly 
thought of only to criticize. Besides that, 
and more potent, was the fact that they and 
their brethren alike were standing close to the 
grim realities of the battlefield, the hospitals, 
and the innumerable graves of the dead. The 
reality which they felt in this was of so very 
different a quality from that which they had 
felt in the questions that had divided them 
previously, as in many cases to sweep away 
all such prejudices, and change entirely the 
perspective and proportion of their views. 
The impression left upon the minds of many of 
us was that the denomination to which a man 
belongs is ultimately a matter of temperament 
rather than conviction, and that all sectarian 
prejudice is an instance of temperament mas- 
querading as conviction. Man's spirit is not 
guided by abstract principles as a rule, but 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 17 

far of tener by the subtler forces of temperament, 
strengthened by spiritual experience. So we 
came to believe that there would always be, 
in all time, many varieties of church life and 
forms of worship. There seems no reason to 
suppose that men will ever cease to group them- 
selves into such classes as ritualistic and non- 
ritualistic, or broad and narrow churchmen. 
And the one thing that is demanded is the 
widest charity in every church which will 
admit that there are those whom some other 
form of worship will suit better than that which 
it supplies, and will rejoice in the variety of 
operations of the Spirit to meet the infinitely 
various spiritual needs of men. Wherever it 
is possible we should stand not only for unity 
of spirit but for union of organization. Anyone 
can see the lamentable waste, not of money 
only, but of enthusiasm and effort, which is 
caused by the overlapping of rival churches 
between whose principles there is no essential 
difference. Thus, for the mere sake of economy, 
all possible unions are to be welcomed. But, 
on the other hand, there are matters which 
divide certain churches from one another which 
run so deep that an attempted union would 
only emphasize the lack of real unity. In 
such cases it is surely wiser that each should 
preserve its own individuality as a separate 
body of believing men. The one great demand 



18 SOME ASPECTS OF 

is for the ending of the spirit of exclusiveness. 
Arrogance of any sort is one of the chiefest 
dangers in the Kingdom or the Church of Him 
Who told His disciples to learn of Him because 
He was meek and lowly of heart: and there 
has been no such cause of spiritual arrogance in 
church history as the violent contentions of 
one denomination against another for the 
exclusive possession of the truth. It is im- 
possible to speak too strongly about this. 
"Delenda est Carthago" : and exclusive arro- 
gance is our Carthage which must be destroyed. 
(2) Efficiency. We must lay upon our con- 
science, above all else, the demand for efficiency 
in our church work and life. In order to 
produce and sustain efficiency it will be neces- 
sary continually to keep our eyes upon the 
appeal which the church is making to the men 
and women of the successive generations, in 
view of their present phases of thought and 
life. Especially in a time like this, when new 
conceptions are crowding in upon each other 
in every department of social, public, and 
private life, must it be necessary to keep revis- 
ing the whole situation. There never can be 
a time when we shall be justified in taking our 
church methods and messages for granted, as 
things which have gone on edifying people 
from time immemorial, and shutting our eyes 
to the question whether these are bringing us 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 19 

a living grasp of the problems of the present 
hour. The churches tend always to lapse into 
the somnolent life of spiritual clubs, which 
may be excellent places of luxury for the elect, 
but which have no meaning for the live world 
of men and women around them. A great 
American preacher, contrasting the hard and 
upright pews when he began his ministry with 
the luxurious sofas on which his congregation 
heard his later words, told them that when he 
began to preach there the congregation burst 
forth into the eager doxology, " Praise God 
from whom all blessings flow," while now 
they expressed themselves in the pathetic notes 
of "Art thou weary, art thou languid?" The 
spiritual club must always become weary and 
languid, but that is an abnormal thing in Chris- 
tianity. The rest which Christ promises to his 
followers is not a still or idle rest : it is a peace 
that garrisons the hearts of men girded for 
aggressive work. Thus it behooves us to-day 
to clear our decks for action. 

We have already spoken of this in connection 
with that working creed which is the essential 
part of our belief. Let us apply it also to the 
matter of organization. It has often seemed 
to me that the vision of Ezekiel had an 
interesting bearing upon the matter of church 
organization. In that vision the prophet saw 
the chariot of the Lord, and there were wheels 



20 SOME ASPECTS OF 

in it, and as it were a wheel within a wheel. We 
all know that chariot, and most of us have some- 
times been at our wits' end to manage the com- 
plication of wheels in the church machine. The 
fact is that most churches have too many wheels 
in them, and in order to bring our church life 
back to reality there is a good deal that ought 
to be stopped. There is no harm in wheels, 
but then, like the prophet's, there ought to be 
eyes in the wheels so that the church may see 
whither it is going; and there ought to be the 
Spirit of the Lord in the wheels, that effective 
and purposeful Spirit which can never inhabit 
or direct useless machinery. Whenever any 
part of the church organization has become 
obsolete it should be cut off or changed. You 
may have met occasionally the ancient church 
member who is proud of the fact that he has 
been a regular attendant of the Young Men's 
Meeting for forty years — and is now almost its 
only attendant. One respects such a man for 
his fidelity, but wishes that he had also been 
granted some corresponding sense of humor. 
There is no virtue or advantage in perpetuat- 
ing any society for a day longer than it is living 
and serves a definite purpose. The preliminary 
duty in all church organization is to clear 
off every piece of surplusage, and to end 
everything that is effete: then with keen 
eyes to scrutinize the present situation, to 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 21 

strengthen and adapt all existing organiza- 
tions which can be useful in present circum- 
stances, and to invent new ones where they are 
required. 

In this plea for reality we have been dealing 
only with outward things, but reality always 
includes idealism as well. Realism is the 
most unreal thing in the world. The high 
ideals which the church was created to proclaim, 
the essential message which she is there to tell 
— these are the supreme questions for her real- 
ity and her effect. If, indeed, God has broken 
silence and given to men in his church definite 
words to proclaim to their fellows, all else 
should be held in subordination to the full and 
effective proclamation of those words. This 
is a matter for the conscience both of minister 
and congregation, and we who preach should 
continually see to it that the thing we say is 
vital, and is such that we can reverently regard 
it as the authentic Word of the Lord. All 
else is of secondary importance to that; and 
in our rededication we should examine our- 
selves concerning our message, and certify our 
consciences that, so far as we are able to judge, 
it is indeed the Word of God. 

3. The Social Outlook 

In such a day as this it is imperative that 
we should all realize as we never did before 



22 SOME ASPECTS OF 

that no man liveth unto himself. Indeed, one 
of the chief effects of the War upon most men's 
minds has been the expansion of the idea of 
personality. We are personal within various 
circles of shorter or longer radius. The most 
intimate view of personality is that of the 
individual interests and purposes and destinies 
which are determined by our own personal 
and individual life. But there is also a per- 
sonality which is determined by the conditions 
of home, the wider circles of friendship, of fellow- 
workmen, and so on; and beyond that there is 
the personality which is part of our society, 
and which is determined for each of us by the 
social, economic, and moral conditions of every 
other member of that society. We cannot 
separate ourselves from men, nor cease to 
identify ourselves with their social well-being, 
without ceasing to be fully personal ourselves. 
The hermit who cares for none of these things 
is a human being whose personality has shrunk. 
Only he who lives in the questions of his day 
and the common interests of mankind can 
claim to be in the larger sense personal. 

This means, of course, that each of us is 
called upon to take his share in the play of 
thought and conscience that is operating around 
him. The two points at which this necessity 
needs to be most clearly defined are at present 
those of home and labor. 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 23 

Many things are to-day threatening the sa- 
credness and, indeed, the security of home life. 
On the one hand the changed conditions of life 
are leaving less time and leisure for the cultiva- 
tion of the old and sacred home loyalties, and the 
relations between parents and children are in 
serious danger on that account. On the other 
hand the complexities of the marriage problem 
have given rise to many theories, and in some 
quarters to a very distinct propaganda, which 
threaten the old loyalties and tend toward a view 
of marriage which would make it little better 
than a temporary and convenient contract. 

In regard to labor, amid the bewildering 
multitude of problems which are clamoring 
for solution to-day, one can clearly see one or 
two fundamental principles which must be in- 
cluded in the dedication of every Christian man. 

On the one hand there is the just demand for 
a living wage and for equality of opportunity. 
By a living wage more is meant than a wage 
which shall be sufficient to keep body and soul 
together. It must include room in every life 
for human interests, for beauty and joy and 
love. Equality of opportunity, as distinct from 
the impossible demand for equality of posses- 
sions, means that every human being shall have 
a full chance of making the utmost of himself 
and of developing his powers. 

On the other hand, justice and the welfare 



24 SOME ASPECTS OF 

of society demand protection for the govern- 
ment of the people by the people, and not by 
any section of the community. They demand 
that no organization in any country shall over- 
power the elected government of that country, 
or tyrannize in its own interest over the nation's 
liberties and rights. 

These are but two examples out of a multi- 
tude which might be cited. The world at the 
present time is in a state of great upheaval. In 
wartime, strikes which hampered the fighting 
of men in the field and endangered their lives, 
taking advantage of their heroism for the selfish 
ends of men who stayed at home, were cer- 
tainly among the most despicable phenomena 
of any age. But now, in the universal rest- 
lessness, amid the innumerable strikes that are 
taking place for any reason or for none, it has 
become imperative to get down to bed-rock 
principles. The immediate cause of the rest- 
lessness is, of course, the psychological effect 
of the War, with its dislocation of all ordinary 
ways of living and thinking. But these things 
are symptoms of far wider and deeper facts, and 
there is a widespread sense of inequality in the 
distribution, not only of the good things of 
life, but of the opportunities for living in any 
full and adequate sense. Now, it is impossible 
that Christian men can in the act of rededica- 
tion avoid the responsibility for clear thinking 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 25 

upon these matters. It is not enough to talk 
bitter generalities about Bolshevism. It is a 
time not for invective but for understanding. 
We have too long kept our minds and con- 
sciences in water-tight compartments, as if 
justice or love could ever be confined to any 
one region of human life. I know a city that 
is built upon several ridges of hill with deep 
hollows lying between them. The architects 
of former days bridged these hollows in order 
to provide a level street running from the 
suburbs to the center of that city. By a kind 
of natural gravitation the misery and crime of 
the city sank to its lower levels, which be- 
came a sort of moral swamp or morass, fester- 
ing with the decay of human life. But many 
of the citizens daily crossed the arches as they 
went to and fro from business, and thus man- 
aged to live apart from the wretchedness which 
had invaded their town. That city is like too 
much of our modern life. We have been con- 
tent if we fulfilled respectably our duties to 
our smaller and narrower personality, and we 
all have our arches which permit us to remain 
in ignorance of disagreeable social facts. We 
have our comfortable houses, and we show 
them to our friends with pride, saying, " My 
house." Not until we have gone to the mean- 
est hovel in our town, and heard amid its misery 
the voice of conscience say, " This is your 



26 SOME ASPECTS OF 

house, " have we faced the truth of modern life. 
The strike is your strike, the revolution is your 
revolution; and at the present day there is no 
hiding-place so remote or so secure as that a 
man with any living conscience of Christianity 
can take refuge in it from the call of his fellow 
men. Any dedication which, in a world like 
the present, omits all reference to social con- 
science and effort, will have a strange reception 
when it goes up to heaven as the fit offering of a 
man who owes his life to the blood and death 
and sacrifice of millions of laboring men, 

4. The International Situation 

The widest circle within which to conceive 
of our personality is, of course, the international 
one. As we shall see in a future lecture, the 
War has done nothing to break down the loyalties 
of true patriotism, but it has demanded that 
patriotism shall be no longer exclusive. Inter- 
national problems are the business of every 
man who is capable of reading a newspaper, 
and until he has included them in his dedica- 
tion he cannot have in any case completed it. 
The points at which these affect us most 
directly at the present time are two : 

(1) Our Duty Toward the Vanquished. The 
collapse of the Central European Powers, and 
the five years which preceded that collapse, 
have left many lands in a condition of the most 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 27 

appalling misery that has ever been known on 
earth. The hunger, disease, and death that 
are everywhere to-day in Europe, except in 
one or two favored lands, are a far more clamant 
fact in the situation than any other that could 
be mentioned. We do not ask for any prefer- 
ence or favor to the vanquished over the others; 
but it is demanded from the conscience of every 
Christian man that he shall not eat his own 
bread in contentment, nor shall he dare to give 
thanks to God for it, until he is doing some- 
thing toward the feeding of those who, by 
hundreds of thousands, are starving to death. 
There is a further duty that we owe to the 
vanquished. No country will lie crushed for- 
ever; and they too, whenever they show that 
it is possible to trust them, must necessarily 
be admitted to the comity of nations. Every 
one who pays any attention to the facts of the 
case must necessarily see that this is so. 
Now, it is possible to pour contempt upon our 
fallen enemy, and to continue our reproaches 
so that he will become further embittered, and 
will secretly plan future revenges and prepare 
means to execute them. Those for whom your 
only attitude is contempt, are not likely by 
that treatment to be made fitter for the duties 
which you are already demanding of them in 
view of future days. The need for self-respect 
in the vanquished is as important almost as the 



28 SOME ASPECTS OF 

need for bread, and it were well if we were on 
the outlook for all opportunities of fostering it. 
We should welcome all expressions of a change 
of mind in our former enemies. We should, as 
soon and as far as it is possible to do so, trust 
them to act on different principles in the future. 
In the meantime this will only be possible when 
it is safeguarded by sufficient guarantees of 
good faith; but everything should certainly be 
done to hasten the time when that intolerable 
situation will be over, and we shall all be striv- 
ing for a common future of human well-being. 

(2) Of the League of Nations I shall speak 
in a future lecture, but this I shall say 
to-day. There are those who ask " What is 
the use of all this talk of Utopia, when so many 
people have only hovels to live in? " And the 
answer is that if this Utopia does not come, we 
shall not have even hovels to live in, but only 
graves. The ferocity and the extent of the 
devastation of human life and property in the 
late War are such as to make the vision of a 
future war more frightful than any conception 
of hell that has ever been imagined by man. 
The only thing that stands between us and that 
appalling outlook is some arrangement which 
will be effective for universal peace, and that 
also must enter into our dedication. It has 
been abundantly published by those who know 
the situation best, that the League cannot be 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 29 

manufactured either by statesmen or experts 
of any kind, but that if it is ever to be opera- 
tive it must be the expression of the whole 
conscience and opinion of the people of every 
land. He who in private conversation or in 
public speech does anything to bring this great 
ideal into contempt, or to discourage men from 
hoping in it, is taking upon himself the most 
serious moral responsibility that can well be 
imagined. Our influence may be small and our 
sphere narrow, yet each one of us may do his 
part in accustoming the public mind to think 
in terms of a League of Nations, and so prepar- 
ing the way for the coming of such a League. 

In all this lecture I have tried to suggest 
directions in which our rededication should be 
made. Let us not be satisfied with any mere 
expression of good dispositions, moral, political, 
or religious. Let us think out things all along 
the line, and dedicate our lives to certain clear 
views and definite purposes. Men and women 
so dedicated, and knowing what they are dedi- 
cated to, are the center and source of public 
opinion in every land. This clarity and de- 
termination in our thought and purpose to-day 
is the first duty laid upon us all. The past 
enjoins it, the present needs it, the unborn are 
waiting for it, and God trusts us that we shall not 
fail them. 



30 SOME ASPECTS OF 



CHAPTER II 

The Relation of Christianity to 
Patriotism 

There are many false conceptions of pa- 
triotism, and they have done deep injury to 
the public life of the present time. We have 
all heard of the patriotism which is mere jingo, 
which stands for " one's own country right or 
wrong," and develops into blind race hatred, 
the fruit of ignorance and poverty of imagina- 
tion. Apart from still more serious objections 
to this false ideal, there is the fact that it is 
simply provincialism. It has been well said 
that " the unstrained, fully, realized conscious- 
ness, just as a matter of course, that the region 
beyond one's horizon is as rich, as colored, and 
as practicable, as the region that happens to be 
within it, is liberty." It is obvious that patri- 
otism of the narrower sort is a most noxious 
vice passing itself off as a virtue. True patri- 
otism differs from jingoism radically and com- 
pletely. It has an open eye to the faults as 
well as to the good qualities of one's own land, 
to its defects as well as to its nobilities: it re- 
gards one's own land as a blessing and not a 
curse to other lands, and seeks to establish its 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 31 

relations with the world on a basis, not of dom- 
ination, but of help. 

Patriotism had its origins in very distant 
primitive times. It began as the enlargement 
of home and its intimate circle. In one way or 
other the struggle for existence extended the 
family bonds to a larger number of persons, 
and established the family ideal on a greater 
scale. For purposes of war and defence, for 
advantages for the huntsman the agricul- 
turist and the trader, such an extension was 
absolutely necessary, and gradually it spread 
to the tribe, the race, and the country. In 
the early history of civilization these larger 
companies of men, cemented by race affinity 
and common origin, had assumed such power 
over the imagination and thought of the 
individual that each man tended to regard his 
own country as the only object of service or 
of affection, while he looked askance at men of 
every other race. The lingering relics of this 
barbaric point of view are seen in the jingo 
patriotism of to-day. 

In the world which Christ entered, those 
who lived in the land of Palestine were caught, 
as it were, among three patriotisms. First 
there was the Jewish, with its narrow and in- 
tense belief in itself as the only people of reli- 
gion and of destiny. Then there was the Ro- 
man, which had spread through all the known 



32 SOME ASPECTS OF 

world its huge loyalty to the empire, deifying 
its emperors as an outward expression of the 
fact that the imperial idea was already divine. 
Besides these there was the Greek patriotism, 
whose empire was that of the mind, and whose 
loyalty was that of all cultured spirits through- 
out the world. Among these three rival pa- 
triotisms Jesus lived, and the general impression 
of his attitude is that it was singularly indiffer- 
ent to them all. He entered the Jewish world 
at a time of fierce hatreds. The memory of 
Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabees turned 
Jewish men bitterly against the Greek culture, 
while the memory of the more recent Roman 
conquest was gall and wormwood to the nation, 
and the whole country of Galilee was perpetu- 
ally threatening new rebellions. All this was 
embittered by the policy of the Herods, who 
adopted the Greek culture and fawned upon the 
court of Rome. When they would fain have 
imposed this point of view upon the nation they 
were met by the stern denunciation of their 
subjects, who held that such friendship of the 
world was enmity against God. It was further 
embittered also by the system of publicanism, 
in which Jewish men became tax farmers under 
the Roman government, and thereby incurred 
the stigma of treason, which was affixed upon 
them relentlessly by patriotic Jews. 
In the spirit of Jesus there was much that 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 33 

ran counter to all this. He proclaimed him- 
self the Son of Man, and stood aloof from petty 
hatreds of every kind. He refused utterly to 
become a partisan, and insisted on doing jus- 
tice to outsiders in that land of so many bitter 
hatreds. He carried his independence to such a 
length that those who desired him as a political 
leader actually tried to resort to force in their 
attempts to make him a king. As to the 
Romans, he made many friendships among 
them, and showed no animosity to the Roman 
rule. He excuses his Roman judge, and under- 
stands how little he can comprehend of the 
situation he is there to deal with. He speaks 
words of highest praise to Roman centurions, 
and says of the soldiers who tortured him on 
the cross, " They know not what they do." 
When brought to a definite issue upon the 
point of tribute, he tells men to render unto 
Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and gener- 
ally gives an impression of one whose policy 
it is to accept the facts of his time and country 
without resistance. As to the publicans, it 
was his friendship with them which constituted 
one of the chief reasons for the hatred and per- 
secution with which he met. He saw in them 
not merely renegade Jews, but the bitter reck- 
lessness of the outcast, the pathos of vulgarity, 
and the miseries that often go with riches. 
Pitying them and understanding them, he 



34 SOME ASPECTS OF 

became known as the Friend of publicans and 
sinners. As to the Greeks, he had, indeed, 
nothing in common with Herodism, and his 
words about them that wear soft clothing are 
scornful and contemptuous. But it was not 
because they were foreign that he despised 
them, but because their degenerate Hellenism 
was so petty and so contemptible in comparison 
with his own ideal of the Kingdom of God. 
When Greeks came to visit him one can see 
evident traces of a mutual attraction, and the 
record of their conversation is one of the 
happiest of all the stories of his contact with 
men. Over all lesser loyalties, including them 
all in so far as they were worthy, but excluding 
all their bitter partisanship, there floated in his 
mind and imagination the great ideal of the 
kingdom of heaven and the brotherhood of men ; 
and in such a time as his this necessarily de- 
manded the weakening of lesser patriotic ideals 
that the higher loyalty might be supreme. 

There must be added to this the recollection of 
the personal idiosyncrasy of Jesus. The nomad 
instinct was among the deepest parts of the 
inheritance of Hebrew men, and one can see in 
Jesus many traces of that detachment which is 
so deeply ingrained in the people of Eastern 
lands. When he said that " foxes have holes, 
and the birds of the air have nests; but the 
Son of man hath not where to lay his head," 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 35 

he spoke of that which in him was of choice 
rather than of necessity. Such a nature is 
strongly individualistic, and it was not un- 
natural that the first conception of Christian- 
ity was confined pretty exclusively to the per- 
sonal relation of individual souls with God. 
In the early church this swiftly degenerated 
into the abuses of asceticism, which shocked 
the Roman conscience. Turning its back upon 
public duties of all kinds, it created the same 
problems of diminishing population (owing to 
the practice of celibacy), and of lives withdrawn 
from the service of the state, whose modern 
counterparts are presented by the self-indulgent 
practices and habits of certain classes among 
the wealthy. 

Yet there are undoubtedly strong elements 
of patriotism in the thought of Jesus. To the 
woman of Samaria he claims that salvation 
is of the Jews, and is obviously ready to stand 
up for His own country as against all others 
when its distinctive rights are challenged. 
Nor could anything more clearly express the 
bitter sorrow and passionate affection of the 
patriot's heart than His late words about 
the doom of Jerusalem. 

The early Christian Church presented to 
the world an unintelligible spectacle, and the 
expression of the Roman bewilderment was its 
accusation against the church of the hatred 



36 SOME ASPECTS OF 

of the human race. No stronger nor more 
sweeping charge was ever made against an 
institution, and it was due to the church's 
preference of the Kingdom of God to the king- 
doms of this world. Readers of Marius the 
Epicurean will remember how in early Chris- 
tianity the new Rome superseded the old 
imperial enthusiasm with a spiritual vision 
impossible for any but the initiated to under- 
stand. It is true, as Professor Dill has said, 
that the early Christian was a citizen of two 
cities. Yet the spiritual vision of the City of 
God was commanding, and it undoubtedly did 
extinguish for a time the light of the earthly 
vision in many souls. St. Paul himself mani- 
fested throughout his writings a significant 
indifference to earthly ties and associations, 
and this tended rather to increase than to 
diminish as the persecutions of the first cen- 
turies succeeded one another. 

The indifference was increased also by two 
other causes. The first of these was the 
expectation of the immediate end of the world. 
Early Christendom lived upon tiptoe, expecting 
the momentary return of Christ to take over 
the government of the earth. To men in this 
mood nothing mattered very greatly except 
their relation with Christ; and bonds of pa- 
triotism, no less than those of the family itself, 
undoubtedly were much relaxed. The second 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 37 

cause for the diminished hold of patriotism 
upon the early Christians was the identifica- 
tion of patriotism with the Roman gods. 
Roman patriotism has been defined as " loyalty 
to the gods who had kept by them all through 
their history "; and from the Roman point of 
view Gibbon's words are not inaccurate that 
" every Christian treated with contempt the 
superstitions of his family, his city, and his 
province." At first this state of mind was 
treated by the Roman people with incredulous 
astonishment. It was impossible for their 
minds to conceive such a point of view. But 
the astonishment swiftly changed to fierce 
resentment, and the apprehension of every 
imaginable danger to the state and to the world. 
From the point of view of the Christians, the 
kind of patriotism which they rejected was an 
intolerable bondage. By its insistence on the 
worship of that in which they had no belief, 
it refused them liberty of thought and speech 
and worship. Thus, as against the Roman 
patriotism, Christianity meant for them all 
that was involved in intellectual and spiritual 
freedom, and that glorious liberty of the chil- 
dren of God was dearer to them than any 
country, dearer even than natural ties of blood 
and of affection. 

It would be, however, a false reading of 
history to say that it was the spirituality of 



38 SOME ASPECTS OF 

the early church which opposed patriotic 
sentiments. The two were really quite com- 
patible, and, as a matter of fact, whenever 
persecutions were relaxed, patriotism was at 
once restored. When finally Rome was Chris- 
tianized, patriotism in Christians, both in 
the form of loyalty to Rome itself and to their 
own particular town and province, immediately 
revived. The Christian apologists emphati- 
cally defend the attitude of Christian soldiers 
and citizens on this point. Christianity proved 
itself averse to patriotism only when loyalty 
to one's country was clearly anti-Christian. 
When that obstacle was removed in any in- 
stance, Christianity at once returned to its 
patriotic loyalties, enjoining all to " do their 
duty to the fatherland of earth, while ever 
mindful of the fatherland of souls.' ' 

In the subsequent development of Christian- 
ity in all the lands it conquered, the idea of a 
chivalrous connection between patriotism and 
religion was strong and constant. Rough as 
the forms of it may have been, yet we see it 
developing steadily in every land. The Wales 
of the Arthurian Cycle, Dante's Florence and 
Elizabeth's England, all reveal the noblest 
spirits combining the two ideals. Indeed, as re- 
gards Elizabeth, it has been noted that on her 
accession Protestantism became the accepted 
religion of the nation, so that it came to be 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 39 

the duty of every loyal citizen to uphold it. 
Roman Catholicism thus became identified with 
political revolts and with the enemies of Eng- 
land, while Protestantism became identified 
with her lovers and supporters. In this in- 
stance we see patriotism taking over even 
the ideals of individual churches and blending 
with them. In the Puritan days it was the 
same. The Scottish Covenanters offer a bril- 
liant and conspicuous example, and I need not 
remind you how deeply the two elements have 
blended in America, and how clear that fact has 
been in all the American wars. 

A curious point emerges here. In many 
wars both sides have identified their particular 
patriotism with religion and Christianity. This 
apparent contradiction need not, however, 
perplex us. Each of the warring nations has a 
vision of certain great loyalties, including 
gratitude to their land for all its benefits, the 
sense of honor to that which is their own by 
birth, and all the romantic associations which 
have strengthened and intensified these bonds. 
Every one of these elements is in itself a Chris- 
tian sentiment. The mistake arises in the 
judgment of proportion passed upon the particu- 
lar causes for which the war is being waged. 
That is, of course, a different matter, and it 
does not necessarily interfere with the genuine- 
ness either of the religion or of the patriotism. 



40 SOME ASPECTS OF 

The Christianity of each nation which takes 
part in a war takes on special characteristics 
which belong to national associations. These 
particular features of national life and loyalty 
get mixed up with the larger ideal, so that every- 
thing which can claim to be patriotic seems 
also to be religious. It is only on such grounds 
as these that one can understand the utterances 
of so large a body of the German pastors and 
professors, and especially of such spiritually 
minded men among them as Professor Herrman 
of Marburg, which astonished all the thinking 
world during the Great War. It is to be noted 
that small and persecuted states have shown a 
special tendency to identify God with their 
own national fortunes, rather than with inter- 
national or imperial conceptions of the world. 
God and God's righteousness are continually 
on their side. That is, righteousness as they 
see it and on their scale of proportions. In 
many cases they see it accurately and their 
scale is just: but it cannot be denied that 
sometimes they may be blind to larger inter- 
national considerations, which also must be 
taken account of if one would form an ade- 
quate judgment. 

The outstanding feature of modern public 
life is the rapidity with which the world has 
been internationally organized in recent years. 
Labor, science, industry, sport, foreign mis- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 41 

sions and practically all other human interests, 
have felt the same impulse from local to inter- 
national ideals and habits of thought. In June, 
1913, there was held in Brussels a Congress of 
International Associations, and an international 
monthly magazine was published which con- 
tained a list at that date of no fewer than four 
hundred such associations. This is one of 
the most important facts with which modern 
statesmanship has to reckon. Lord Bryce, in 
his address to the International Congress of 
Historical Studies, has said that whatever 
happens in any part of the world has now a 
significance for every other part. Abraham 
Lincoln expressed the same view in his day, 
and now it has become almost a commonplace 
of statesmanship. 

The War has, of course, increased the mean- 
ing and the spread of internationalism to an 
enormous extent, and the steadily increasing 
rapidity of intercommunication, which has now 
resumed its former course after five years' 
interruption, will continually tend toward inter- 
national rapprochements. 

These international ideals necessarily appeal 
to Christianity, which, being the gospel of 
humanity, has always taken for one of its chief 
watchwords the ideal of the brotherhood of 
men. The modern movement is in the line 
of that faith which in early days transcended 



42 SOME ASPECTS OF 

all barriers separating the Gentile from the 
Jewish world. From the first the Christian 
ideal was the enthusiasm of humanity, whose 
obviously broad and generous theory of life 
has all along been adopted by intelligent Chris- 
tians. In the words of Mr. J. H. Oldham, 
" Christianity from its very nature transcends 
national differences." 

Such views, however, exaggerated and paro- 
died by non-Christian political propagandists, 
have become definitely antagonistic to the 
patriotic ideal. Dr. Johnson's well-known for- 
mula that " patriotism is the last refuge of a 
scoundrel " had not been without many modern 
echoes whose virulence is often untempered by 
the doctor's wit. Many such quotations could 
be given. One British writer, for instance, 
recently stated, in recantation of his former 
doctrines, that he would prefer an invasion of 
Great Britain to the coming in of Universal 
Service. Another writer quotes Maude's book 
on Tolstoy to the effect that patriotism is like a 
suit of armor put on by a young man, which 
no longer fits him in his maturity, and that it 
is already a gigantic superstition which is 
fast becoming a hypocrisy. We are told that 
it obscures our vision, burdens our belief, 
causes blood to flow in torrents, and has become 
a perennial spring of hatred, malice, and evil- 
speaking. Finally we are assured that our 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 43 

welfare lies in the unification and brotherhood 
of men, that the superstitions which divide 
men must be destroyed, and that among these 
superstitions none is worse than patriotism. 
The net result and impression of all this, after 
we have allowed for exaggeration and heat, is 
that patriotism must be considered as old- 
fashioned, a virtue long out of date and hope- 
lessly behind the times. 

Yet, after all this is said, we cannot but 
remember that the main work of Christianity 
is the redemption of human nature in its com- 
pleteness, and that it is the protector rather 
than the destroyer of human instincts. All 
the troubles and dangers of society in the past 
have been due to what Matthew Arnold calls 
" the undue preponderance of single elements." 
Noble causes which have seen the world with 
but too single an eye, have ignored and assailed 
elements on the other side which were equally 
true to human nature, and by doing so have 
sealed their own doom. The mark of Jesus 
Christ is his insistence upon the completeness 
of our manhood. If crushed, instinct tends to 
become gangrenous, and to corrupt and poison 
the whole system of the body politic. Out of 
every clash of social ideals Christianity in the 
end emerges, larger than the particular empha- 
sis of the hour, for the preservation of the 
perpetual human elements, some of which are 



44 SOME ASPECTS OF 

always threatened by violent temporary reac- 
tions. I believe that the corporate spirit as 
embodied in the nation is one of those perpetual 
elements, and that Christianity will ultimately 
be found defending and not assailing it. That 
it is an instinct which has a very deep hold 
upon normal human nature will hardly be 
denied by any of its critics. The response which 
the publication of The Man Without a Country 
drew forth in America and Britain was very 
remarkable, and these sentiments still hold 
their own. There is something in us all, or at 
least in almost all, which justifies Scott's famous 
lines about a man's sentiments toward " his 
own, his native land." A curious instance 
occurred some years ago, in which a man of 
education and good social standing found him- 
self for some trivial offense suddenly within the 
cognizance of the police. He told afterward 
the story of his feeling when the policeman's 
hand touched his shoulder to claim him. The 
sudden revolution which occurred within him 
upset the very foundations of his life, and he 
perceived as in a vision the significance of the 
fact that his own nation had turned against 
him. To be in prison in a foreign country 
may be an inconvenience, or a jest, or even an 
honor; but when your own land judges you 
adversely, when all that you have honored and 
held dear casts you out, the consequent de- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 45 

spair reveals suddenly the grip of the patriotic 
instinct upon the heart. For " the country is 
in itself an entity. It is a Being. The Lord 
God of Nations has called it into existence, and 
has placed it here with certain duties in defense 
of the civilization of the world." These words 
remain permanently true. No nation can 
afford to do without this sentiment, and no 
man can afford to do without it. The man 
without a country, presenting a spectacle of 
one poor individual pitted against a cen- 
tury of the life of the United States of 
America, will remain to the end of time sig- 
nificant. 

It may be replied that the instinct of pa- 
triotism is irrational. Why be loyal to this 
land in particular? Other lands may be greater 
than our own, with larger opportunities, more 
spiritual aspirations, and more effective or- 
ganization. Why should we not choose the 
land which is best all round, in these and other 
respects, and call that our country? Let us 
admit for the time being that the instinct is 
irrational. I am by no means on the side of 
those who of recent years have originated what 
might almost be called a cult of irrationality, 
but one has to remember that these writers 
have been taken seriously. Benjamin Kidd, 
in his Social Evolution, made so strong an at- 
tack upon the practice of putting one's faith in 



46 SOME ASPECTS OF 

reason as to force the thinking world to revise 
its whole conception of the relation of reason to 
faith. Now, the main point of Kidd's book is 
that religion depends always upon irrational 
sanctions, and that its demands, which it al- 
ways has been able to enforce upon faith and 
conscience, are ultra-rational in their appeal. 
Personally I am far from subscribing to this 
doctrine in its entirety, but there is no question 
whatever as to the importance of that which is 
entirely beyond the scope of reasoning, in de- 
termining conduct and establishing principles 
of faith. We are asked why we should give 
our loyalty and devotion to this land in par- 
ticular, and the answer is simply because it is 
our land. The same thing is true in regard to 
the family. Why should we be loyal to this 
particular man because he happens to be our 
father, or set this particular child who happens 
to be our own child above the children of other 
people in our esteem? It is not that these are 
absolutely the best persons in the world, for 
there may be other fathers or other children 
whose moral character is superior to theirs. 
Nor can we justify our preference by the belief 
that these are the wisest, or the cleverest, or 
the kindest of parents and children. The 
obvious answer that we make to the whole 
perplexity is, " This father is your father and 
this child is your child." Nature has assigned 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 47 

these and no others to you as your parent or 
your child. Your loyalty to them may be as 
irrational as anybody likes to call it, but it is 
a fact, and it will never cease to be a fact 
while your human nature remains sound and 
normal. Certain extreme forms of Socialistic 
theory have ignored this, and pressed their 
rationalism to the length of the subversion of 
the family ideal. In much recent literature 
about marriage problems and all that these 
involve in connection with the family, there 
has been a tendency to revolt from all the old 
loyalties and to subordinate the security of 
homes to the convenience and pleasure of in- 
dividuals. Mr. Chesterton's well-known an- 
swer is summed up in three words, " loyalty to 
life." There could not be a better expression 
of that instinct, which cuts through all sophis- 
tries however plausible, and appeals to whole- 
some natures, apart altogether from reasons 
that can be given and argued. 

If this be so, patriotic and family loyalty is 
not irrational after all. If it is a deep and 
essential element in human nature, which 
asserts itself independently of any reasoning 
pro or con, then we may take it for granted 
that deep and essential reasons ultimately will 
be found. Nature is very wise and in the end 
is sane, and she can give a reason for the faith 
which she asks men to place in her. We shall 



48 SOME ASPECTS OF 

now turn to some of those reasons which lie 
behind patriotic loyalty. 

1. The Larger Cosmopolitan Brotherhood is 
too large a unit for all the purposes which it 
requires to serve. We admit its claims so 
far as they go, and we admit the advantage of 
a wider outlook than that of mere family and 
country, and the duty of a sense of brotherhood 
with all the world. We admit also that to the 
end there will be a state of unstable equilibrium 
and necessary compromise between the larger 
and smaller ideals which we shall find ourselves 
compelled to cherish. As Matthew Arnold has 
pointed out, each nation is in need of elements 
which abound in some other nation, and the 
narrow kind of patriotism which would refuse 
all such accessions to our national inheritance 
would be a wanton impoverishment of the 
spirit. Besides all this, we simply cannot 
escape the wider brotherhood even if we would. 
Historically, the touch of one nation with an- 
other has always been the meeting place of va- 
rious streams of ideas ; and the blended stream 
has flowed from that point, not only richer for 
the contact, but vitalized by it and fuller than the 
sum of the two national streams that met. Our 
British patriotism, for instance, involves loyalty 
to at least ten different national ideals, for it is 
extraordinarily composite, and retains elements 
of everything that went to its making. 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 49 

All this tends to the necessary cosmopoli- 
tanism which must exist in every rightly 
balanced mind. Yet that wider unit can never 
take the place of or expel our loyalty to the 
nation. It has been proved abundantly by 
experience that there is a point beyond which 
the expansion of loyalties simply will not work. 
There are certain limits within which our 
human forces have to be confined if they are 
to be effective for practical ends. Beyond 
these limits the forces grow diffuse and futile. 
If you have so much water and no more, you 
may send it down the valley in a narrow channel 
or allow it to expand into a broad lagoon, but 
in the one case you will be able to utilize it for 
practical purposes which you wish to achieve, 
while in the other case it will accomplish 
nothing. All ideals of every kind have their 
limits within which alone they can work effec- 
tively, and the worst enemies of each ideal 
are those who try to push it beyond its limits 
and expect it to do effective work so. 

Of altruism this is notoriously true. As a 
matter of fact, one does not love one's fellow 
men with any great intensity unless these are 
in the nearer groups. A railway accident near 
our home will cause profound emotion in 
almost everybody, but we read without any 
such emotion of a similar railway accident 
which has happened to take place on the other 



50 SOME ASPECTS OF 

side of the world, in a country which we have 
never seen and with which we have no personal 
connection. To love one's fellow men as such 
is indeed a Christian commandment, but it 
has required the whole strength of men's per- 
sonal attachment to Christ to make it possible 
to obey that commandment, and it has been 
well said that it is only for His sake that one is 
able to do it at all. To love our neighbor as 
ourself is apt to be nothing more than a pious 
generality, and the young man's question, 
" Who is my neighbor? " is eminently perti- 
nent. Christ has given an incalculable in- 
crease to men's power of imagining, and has 
flung the horizon of our sympathies far out 
beyond its former limits; yet the facts remain, 
and all the most important work of humani- 
tarianism is done, not on the circumference, 
but near the center. The strength and patience 
and loyalty with which we can face the wider 
problems depend mainly upon the intenser 
feelings which we experience in the regions 
nearest to the individual. 

First in intensity comes the marriage bond, 
which still remains the ultimate basis of all 
other fidelities. Next to that there is the 
loyalty to one's family and friends, known to 
the Romans as pietas; and, third, there is our 
feeling to our own land and the patriotic 
traditions and loyalties upon which that feeling 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 51 

rests. These are human nature at the heart of 
it. By these chiefly human society stands or 
falls, and by forcing out the bond further afield 
one is apt to find that all the loyalties are grow- 
ing weaker. In a word, these three loyalties are 
the source from which the force for the wider 
enterprise of cosmopolitanism is supplied. It 
is a very interesting fact in illustration of 
this statement that the most successful mis- 
sionaries have generally been exceptionally 
patriotic men and women. One has only to 
read the lives of such men as Livingstone, 
Mackinnon of Damascus, or Stewart of Love- 
dale, to realize how true this is. 

The danger of neglecting this bed-rock fact 
of human nature is that of importing into our 
public life the element of vflpis, that inso- 
lence, or presumptuous disregard of the facts 
of nature, which goes with an eye fixed only on 
far-off things. He that loveth not the nation 
which he hath seen, how shall he love the 
nations which he hath not seen? He cannot 
love them. He can let his imagination indulge 
itself among them, but he will always be more 
or less of a spiritual tourist, without those 
responsibilities which attach to his immediate 
neighborhood. It is by bearing the actual and 
obvious responsibilities of his life that a man's 
disposition will be tempered and trained so as 
to be able rightly to cope with further and wider 



52 SOME ASPECTS OF 

ones. The only true fire of altruistic enthu- 
siasm burns from within outward. Thus our 
argument is that cosmopolitanism is too big 
and vague an ideal for practical purposes. 
It tends to a cheap and easy humanitarianism, 
which is generally ineffective. Humanity at 
large does not mean much to any of us, and 
does not ask much from us. But our own land 
does ask much — it asks very many and very 
definite things. He who disparages patriotism 
in favor of the larger unit may very well find 
that, consciously or unconsciously, his trans- 
ference of loyalty involves the shirking of defi- 
nite responsibilities. In other words, our good 
feeling toward mankind in general must begin 
somewhere, and it will be always wisest and 
soundest when it begins near home and not at 
the antipodes, among the men we know best 
and not those we know least. 

It may be added that this has been proved on 
many occasions to be historically true. Greece 
produced her best art in the time of her narrow 
patriotic enthusiasms. Afterward, in the days 
of a wider and more diffused culture, her 
originality died out. The intense loyalty of 
the early Roman days is another example. 
When she achieved world-wide empire Rome 
had indeed seized upon an idea of unparalleled 
magnificence, but even that sublime idea 
proved itself unable to keep her loyalties alive. 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 53 

2. A second argument for the rationality 
of patriotism is the consideration that patriotic 
loyalties are, in the last analysis, neither more 
nor less than the repayment of lawful debts. 
This is a point of view which cannot be ignored, 
because it is this which best defines Christian 
patriotism and reveals its special qualities. 
The past has done much for us, and the only 
way of discharging our debt to the past is to 
pay it over to the future. A large part of this 
debt is due to our own land and must be paid 
to that land. This, as it seems to me, is not 
in the least irrational. The debt is not an 
affair of fantastic honor, but of plain and com- 
mon honesty which no one can afford to avoid 
or neglect. In four different ways this debt 
may be detailed: 

(1) Your land has fought for you. Even the 
shortest tour that we take in any of the older 
lands conducts us from battlefield to battlefield 
where men have laid down their lives in multi- 
tudes as the price that had to be paid for the 
freedom and prosperity which are the inheri- 
tance of their successors. This debt must be 
paid, not in vain boasting about the glory of 
ancient battles, but in the acceptance of disci- 
pline as the law of our own life. We hold our 
liberties, our comforts, and our very selves, 
from hands that were wet with blood when 
they passed them on to us. There has been 



54 SOME ASPECTS OF 

of late years a very distinct tendency toward 
that worship of comfort which demands that 
everything shall be made easy for everybody, 
and the love of pleasure was certainly tending 
to soften the fiber of human nature. Lord 
Morley has expressed this in memorable words : 
" Far the most penetrating of all the influences 
that are impairing the moral and intellectual 
nerve of our generation . . . with new wealth 
come luxury and love of ease, and that fatal 
readiness to believe that God has placed us in 
the best of all possible worlds, which so lowers 
men's aims and unstrings their firmness of 
purpose. Pleasure saps high interests, and the 
weakening of high interests leaves more undis- 
puted room for pleasure.'' The Great War 
has indeed put a fearful check upon any such 
tendency, but one must remember that in the 
reaction after great wars there is always a 
special danger of falling deeper into those evil 
ways which the war for the time has reversed. 
Not in the war only, but to the end of time, it 
remains true that there is no royal road which 
leads anywhere worth getting to, and that the 
flowery paths of life are always apt to end in 
the eternal bonfire. Thomas Carlyle's demand 
for obedience will never cease to find an answer 
in the consciences of wise men: "Were your 
superiors worthy to govern and you worthy to 
obey, reverence for them were even your only 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 55 

possible freedom." Not in the army only, but 
all along the line of life, there will be places in 
which imposed and unchallenged discipline will 
be necessary. There is no inherent objection 
to blind obedience. Until a man is competent, 
his obedience cannot be too blind. No man 
has any right to hold any position he cannot 
occupy for the public good, nor to enjoy any 
privilege he cannot use for the public benefit. 

In fact, the first need is not to enjoy oneself 
or to assert one's rights; it is to find oneself, 
and that can be done only through discipline 
and many defeats. We soon discover that 
we cannot all be firsts, and he who does not 
love his work well enough to do his very best 
in the second place or the third is no true pa- 
triot. To take a licking and wait your time 
is the mark of a wise pupil in the school of life. 
Such discipline seems to be the only way in 
which we can make any presentable return to a 
land that has fought for us on many fields. 

(2) Your land has educated you. In my 
own country of Scotland we know all about 
that. It is a land where the parish schools 
have had their " lads o' pairts "; where fisher- 
men will discuss intelligently the high politics 
of the day while they mend their nets; where 
your plowman will talk philosophy to you, and 
your gardener discuss evolution, and your grave- 
digger expatiate upon predestination; where the 



56 SOME ASPECTS OF 

diker, building or repairing the walls between 
the fields, will take from his pocket at meal- 
times his Latin grammar, or will read theology 
in the dark of the evening by the light of a 
knotted fir branch. Scotland has been rooted 
and grounded in knowledge. Its education 
has not been merely a cramming with facts, 
for it has been taught to think. Its education 
has not been a thing plastered on to it from the 
outside, but has been the expression of its 
inner self, springing from a sense of personal 
worth, and an impulse to communicate its 
gifts to others. America may justly make an 
equal claim. 

How shall we pay our debt to such a land? 
Obviously, the first answer must be that if in 
the past she has struggled toward education in 
such fashions as those just mentioned, the 
least we can do is to accept our inheritance of 
education and be educated. Our land has 
written; what do you and I read? She has 
striven in the sweat of her brow toward knowl- 
edge; how much and how thoroughly do we 
know? But we cannot pay our debt to our 
land by any theoretical education. Efficiency 
is demanded of us, all along the line of labor. 
We should be impatient of all policies of 
" muddle through," which have cost some of 
us so dear in the last five years, and should 
insist for ourselves and others upon good work- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 57 

manship as the first demand of industry, re- 
garding all questions of payment as means 
toward the grand end of excellent productivity. 
Lord Rosebery has said that " a man who 
breaks stones on the road is, after all, serving 
his country in some way. He is making her 
roads better for her commerce and her traffic." 
And if a man asks himself sincerely and con- 
stantly the question, " What can I do, in how- 
ever small a way, to serve my country? " he 
will not be long in finding an answer. These 
words remind us of the familiar lines of Robert 
Burns : 

"A wish that to my latest hour 
Will strongly heave my breast, 
That I for puir old Scotland's sake 
Some useful plan or book might make, 
Or sing a sang at least." 

To be ashamed of cheap success, and to 
heighten our standard of what success in life 
really means, to remember that " the demands 
of our God are hard on every human candidate 
for a career " — these things are included in 
the honest payment of our debt to our land. 

(3) Your land has suffered for you. The 
words of Robert Louis Stevenson are perhaps 
not too strong, when he said of Scotland: 
" Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise and constant 
resolution are fibers of the legend of this coun- 



58 SOME ASPECTS OF 

try's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland 
have been tragically fated. The most marking 
incidents in Scottish history — Flodden, Darien, 
or the '45 — are still either failures or defeats; 
and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses 
of the Bruce combine with the very smallness 
of the country to teach, rather, a moral than a 
material criterion for life." What is so pre- 
eminently true of Scotland is in its degree true 
of every country. In large measure all men 
owe their lives to the pain of their motherland, 
and spring to life in their own generation out of 
centuries of struggle, self-denial, and suffering. 
The only way of paying this particular debt 
must be by relieving suffering as it still remains 
around us. We cannot go back through the 
centuries and minister to the dead; but we who 
are what we are by reason of their pain, nobly 
endured, must find their heirs in those around 
us who are suffering to-day. The miseries of 
any land are the worst enemies of patriotism. 
They have in the past called it forth, and pro- 
duced much of the finest history in doing so; 
but that is no excuse for any generation permit- 
ting them still to torture fellow human beings 
unrelieved. The sweet uses of adversity are 
the business of Providence; the business of 
man is ever to end or to mitigate adversity. 
In our time this is notoriously true. We all 
know the magnificence of the response that the 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 59 

working men of the Allied Nations made to 
the call of the Great War, but it is only some of 
us who realize that in many of our works and 
factories there is a strong feeling that the 
workers have nothing to defend, a feeling which 
is sapping the very life of patriotism. Lord 
Curzon not long ago in weighty words expressed 
this: " You cannot run an empire on empty 
stomachs. You cannot sustain an empire with 
discontented citizens. You cannot preach an 
empire to poverty-stricken homes. If you 
wish to call upon the patriotism and idealism 
of the people, you must consider how to make 
things easier for them in the conditions of 
their everyday life." The same truths hold of 
a republic. 

(4) Your land has believed. Great battles 
have been fought in every country upon relig- 
ious causes. It is easy to see the grotesqueness 
of some of these, and the wild exaggeration of 
the importance of certain of the points fought 
for, yet the root of it all was faith; and, how- 
ever exaggerated its expression, the priceless 
thing that is to be found in the past is the great 
convictions by which men lived. Truths were 
dearer than advantages; truth was more pre- 
cious than life. 

In asking how this debt may be paid back, 
we are faced with the question, What are your 
convictions and mine? What are we willing to 



60 SOME ASPECTS OF 

live for without compromise and without ques- 
tioning? For faith is ultimately at the root 
of all social problems, as it is also at the root of 
character. It is faith which makes the struggle 
seem permanently worth while, and it is faith 
alone in which a land will ultimately remain 
great. Thus patriotism, while it does not neces- 
sarily involve the perpetuity of an ancient na- 
tional creed, yet does absolutely demand that 
every true citizen shall retain from the past, and 
express in his own fashion, a sufficient bed-rock 
of conviction to enable him to build upon it a 
worthy house of life. The words of Browning 
are preeminently applicable: 

" Here and here did England help me; how can I help 
England? say. 
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise 
and pray." 

These, then, are the ways in which it is fitting 
that we should repay our debt to the past; 
but while we are making such repayments it is 
impossible for anyone to throw off the thought 
of how they came to be due. They belong to 
the direct line of our country's history; and 
the noblest men in any country do these things 
and cultivate such character, not merely as 
men at large, but as men of a certain land which 
has laid upon them definite bonds of honor to 
act in these ways. 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 61 

CHAPTER III 

Individual and National Morality 

Beneath the obvious ethics of the late 
situation — the broken treaty with Belgium, 
the atrocities committed under the name of 
frightfulness, and the Pan-German policy of 
empire, with its imposition of German kul- 
tur upon less favored nations — there is one 
fundamental difference of opinion. The ex- 
treme advocates of pacificism applied the 
precepts of the Sermon on the Mount with 
rigorous literalness to the situation between 
the warring nations, and denied that there is 
any distinction between individual and na- 
tional morality. The Prussians, on the other 
hand, founded their whole polity on that 
distinction. Their argument practically was: 
" The laws of morality are different for nations 
from those which govern men as individuals. 
We are, in this war, acting as a nation. There- 
fore we need have no respect for moral law, 
and can do anything we please/' The choice 
between these two positions is a grim one, and 
the problem of finding a trustworthy via media 
is certainly one of the most difficult tasks in 
casuistry that has ever been presented to man. 



62 SOME ASPECTS OF 

'For the Prussian expression of it we might 
quote many well-known passages from Bern- 
hardt book, Germany and the Next War, which 
presented in a popular form the philosophy 
which dominated the national mind. Bern- 
hardi sometimes hesitates to carry his principles 
to their full length. Yet the general argument 
is quite clear. For the state the one virtue is 
power, the one sin feebleness. Therefore, in 
the end, everything is right which gives or in- 
creases national power. Thus the argument 
merges all morality for a nation in the one great 
end of war, namely, success. 

By the way, Bernhardi quotes and founds 
upon Machiavelli. Machiavelli is on much 
surer ground. He is emphatically not ham- 
pered with a conscience. The Prince is secure 
from all questions of right or wrong. They 
never once occur to him. He is detached as the 
wind — the heartless wind which overturns 
navies, or cleanses cities from the plague. 
Taking for his fundamental belief the baseness 
of man, he goes on through long stretches of 
dispassionate immorality to state his case: 
" Therefore a prince cannot, nor ought he, to 
keep faith when any such observance may be 
turned against him." "It is necessary for a 
prince, wishing to hold his own, to know how to 
do wrong, and to make use of it or not accord- 
ing to necessity." And so on. 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 63 

If Henry Morley's explanation be correct, 1 
surely we have here one of the most remarkable 
of the ironies of history. According to him, 
Machiavelli wrote it all in satire. Personally, 
he was and remained a man keeping faith, 
loyal and poor all his life, living decently in 
the country with his wife and five children. 
He wrote for the corrupt Lorenzo an account 
of what a man like Lorenzo, wholly void of 
principles, should be and do, if he " would be 
master of his country's liberties, and would 
confound all duties of the children of men in 
the one object of self-aggrandizement." If 
this be so, truly there must have been much 
laughter of the gods in the time of the Seven 
Years' War. 

But this is beside the point. The Prussians 
appear to have accepted Machiavelli frankly 
and in all seriousness, as the authority upon 
national as contrasted with individual morality. 
If Bernhardi could not always go with him all 
the way, there were plenty of others who could 
and did. The weakness of German thinking 
before the war was exaggeration, It saw one 
principle and carried it out ruthlessly to such 
lengths that its truth became a lie. It did not 
see it in its relations, nor in the light of any 
modifying considerations. But the world is 
not made so simply as that. It is very complex. 

1 See his introduction to Machiavelli's History of Florence. 



64 SOME ASPECTS OF 

In view of the havoc wrought by this exag- 
geration, it was inevitable that some of those 
who felt the savagery of it all should be tempted 
to go to the opposite extreme. Nothing could 
be more natural than the simple reversion to 
the Sermon on the Mount as the final solution 
for all such difficulties. Take that as the 
Christian law for nations under the present and 
all other possible periods, and you at once end 
all controversy. But this also is too simple a 
policy, and it involves the misunderstanding 
not of the Sermon on the Mount alone but of 
the whole mind and speech of Jesus. Those 
who adopt it are holding the sword of the Spirit 
by the blade and not by the hilt. Jesus was 
essentially a poet. When one says that, some 
people are apt to shake their heads, as if there 
were an antithesis between poetry and truth. 
There is indeed an antithesis between the poetic 
and the pedantic view of things, and in poetry 
literalism can never be at home. The sensitive 
delicacy of thought and feeling which charac- 
terizes a poet's vision of things is always liable 
to perversion by the meticulous. It is impos- 
sible for some persons to understand anything 
otherwise than in minute literalness, and there 
seems to be no argument that will convince such 
minds. Christianity has suffered many things 
from such literalists. For want of allowance 
for the poetic element in Christ's speech, 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 65 

many who accepted his words literally have 
found themselves continually being led down 
blind alleys, and filled with the discouragement 
of constant and inevitable failure. Others, re- 
jecting his words upon the same fallacy of 
literalism, have passed by the whole teaching of 
Christ as doctrinaire and in the clouds. The 
fact is that life is too complex for language, and 
that the poet's exaggeration is the only way in 
which some truths can be expressed at all. 
This being so, it is a perfectly justifiable policy 
to state one side of a truth so vividly, strongly, 
and exclusively, as to make sure that it at least 
will never be forgotten, and to trust the intel- 
ligence of readers and hearers to understand. 
Thus, in the familiar parable, the mustard 
seed is described as the least of all seeds, but, 
in order to vindicate the veracity of Jesus, it is 
not necessary to search for some unheard-of 
variety of mustard seed which is smaller than 
the spore of ferns. The dogma of Transub- 
stantiation was invented by literalists because 
Jesus, before His death, said of the bread at the 
last supper, " This is my body." When we are 
told to take no thought for food or clothes or 
any of the exigencies of tomorrow, and when 
non-resistance is enjoined upon us concerning 
property and violence, one sees the vision of 
an ideal world appearing, towards which the 
spirit must ever strive to approach, but which 



66 SOME ASPECTS OF 

cannot be completely entered here. It is a 
world of things rich and strange, which draws 
men after it, saving them as they follow on. 
But the words in which alone it can be ex- 
pressed are not the words of this world's usage. 
Other sayings there are, such as that which lays 
down the hatred of father and mother as a 
necessary condition of discipleship, which must 
be regarded as detonating words whose ob- 
ject is to stir men's thought and imagination, 
rather than literal injunctions involving the 
reversal of any possible standards of human life. 
The literal appeal to the Sermon on the 
Mount rests on the ignoring of one great fact. 
That fact is that, in the present condition of 
human society, public and national moral 
standards are lower than those of private in- 
dividuals. Not only are they lower, but they 
must and ought to be lower, if we are to deal 
justly with the situation. This fact has been 
expressed crudely and objectionably. Bishop 
Magee's saying is well known, that "it is not 
possible for the state to carry out all the pre- 
cepts of Christ. A state that attempted to do 
so could not exist for a week." Mr. Lecky's 
words are not less forcible: " In practical pol- 
itics public and private morals will never ab- 
solutely correspond. ... In different nations 
[the national code] is higher or lower, but it will 
never be the exact code on which men act in 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 67 

private life. It is certainly widely different 
from the Sermon on the Mount." Such state- 
ments taken by themselves are inaccurate and 
misleading, yet they are the attempt to express 
forcibly a view which is obviously correct. 
This is the view which Mr. Fielding Hall also 
expresses in his saying that " the government 
is always behind the soul of a people." It is 
this fact, startling as it may be to many, which 
we must face directly to-day, if we are to arrive 
at any helpful teaching for the present and the 
future situation. Let us, then, first of all 
glance at a few of the more important reasons 
which may be adduced in favor of it. 

1. Public and national morality must be 
fixed mainly in accordance with the standard of 
the average man. National morality is ex- 
pressed in legislation, and it is evident that just 
and stable legislation must represent the mind 
and will of the majority of the people. This is 
one of the axioms of democratic government. 
But this means that legislation can never rep- 
resent the highest ideals of the highest men in a 
nation. It can only represent the conscience 
of the average man. To force it, by introduc- 
ing into the statute book laws by which the 
saints of a land try to govern themselves, is 
always and utterly impossible. It is unjust 
to the majority of the citizens, and in this case 
the paradox is true — summajus summa injuria. 



68 SOME ASPECTS OF 

In practice, any legislation which could thus 
be forced upon a nation would be morally as 
well as politically disastrous. 

This becomes clear when we remember that 
in every nation, as things actually stand, there 
are three classes: 

(A) The idealists and saints. 

(C) The criminals and moral degenerates. 

(B) Between these two, and forming in every 
nation the vast majority, there is the middle 
class, average man, representing many shades 
of opinion and practice, higher and lower. 
In an autocratic or bureaucratic state, legisla- 
tion is forced upon the majority, and if those in 
power choose to have it, so they may enforce 
the laws of the idealist. Yet this will always be 
regarded as tyrannical, and such government 
will never be secure. In a democratic state 
such legislation would not only be tyrannical, 
it would be impossible. For the majority 
make the laws, and idealistic laws are above the 
average man's present capacity, above his con- 
victions, above what he understands, and con- 
sequently above his will. If, by some coup 
oVetat, catch vote, or other such chance circum- 
stance, laws of this kind are passed, the result 
will necessarily be pernicious. Good and stable 
government must have behind it the conscience 
of the nation. There is no greater curse than 
that of enforced ideals. They lead directly to 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 69 

all manner of fraud and abuse. They corrupt 
legislation by making it impossible to carry it 
out. 

Illustrations to enforce this argument are 
to be found on all hands. On the largest scale 
you have the tragic spectacle of those nations 
which have of recent years attempted forms 
of government which were in advance of the 
national stage of moral progress. Turkey, 
Persia, and Russia introduced parliamentary 
government before they were ready for it, and 
in each case it has been a notorious failure. 
China has been experimenting in republican 
government, as yet with like result. In regard 
to morals, the huge experiment of prohibition 
in the United States only became possible after 
long-continued and graduated experiment in 
individual States, whose results convinced the 
majority that the prohibition law was desirable. 

In this I am referring chiefly to normal con- 
ditions in a time of peace. In the stress of war 
much that is abnormal may become necessary 
for the time being, and such measures as the 
suspension of the rules of trades unions, and 
conscription itself, may be legitimately enforced. 
But these and other such laws can only be 
enforced in wartime in virtue of the fact that 
the country has for the time surrendered its 
right of judgment to those whom it has trusted 
with the management of the war. It is will- 



70 SOME ASPECTS OF 

ing for the stress of the moment to obey their 
judgment implicitly, but when the war is over 
it resumes its own right of legislation. Of 
course enforced temporary legislation may 
make discoveries, and may so commend its 
enforced laws to the general conscience that 
they will become permanent by vote of the 
nation afterward, and this will be one of the 
best fruits of any war. Still, the general 
principle is true, that in normal conditions the 
only legitimate standard of legislation is the 
will, not of the elect, but of the majority, 
the average man. 

2. The nation is the trustee for its individual 
citizens. "It is probable," says Lecky, " that 
the moral standard of most men is much lower 
in political judgments than in private matters 
in which their interests are concerned." " It 
is always hazardous to argue from the character 
of a corporation to the characters of the mem- 
bers who compose it." " Large bodies," says 
Macaulay, " are far more likely to err than 
individuals. The passions are inflamed with 
sympathy; the fear of punishment and the 
sense of shame are diminished by partition. 
Every day we see men do for their faction what 
they would rather die than do for themselves. 
It is the nature of parties to retain their original 
enmities far more firmly than their original 
principles." Certainly, all boards, commit- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 71 

tees, public companies — not excluding church 
courts — tend to act upon a standard lower 
than that of the private individuals who com- 
pose them. 

Macaulay has adduced for this fact the lower 
set of reasons, but there are also higher reasons. 
The trustee is bound by obligations from which 
the individual is free. Take, for example, 
the question of armaments. Nobody can fail 
to see the extravagant waste which these in- 
volve. Yet that waste has been enforced upon 
the nations as trustees of the safety of their 
citizens. It may be quite legitimate for an 
individual, obeying what he understands to be 
the highest law, to talk of putting himself in a 
defenseless position, and taking the risk. But 
the nation is the trustee of all its institutions, 
of all its men, women, and children. It can- 
not act with the same freedom as the individual 
possesses, for such action may involve the 
betrayal of the trust committed to it, and no 
crime is greater than the betrayal of such a trust. 
In such cases there sometimes will rise the 
clash of two consciences — the conscience which 
would make us as individuals surrender every- 
thing rather than fight for our rights, and the 
conscience which demands that we shall protect 
those whose defense has been intrusted to our 
charge. Surely it is evident that the latter 
conscience is that which should prevail. 



72 ■ SOME ASPECTS OF 

For we are here confronted with the whole 
question of rights, and the morality of insisting 
or declining to insist upon them. The indi- 
vidual may find that his highest ideal of conduct 
leads him to renounce his rights in certain given 
circumstances. But it does not follow that a 
nation is justified in following a similar course. 
The nation is the guardian and trustee of the 
individuals whose fate depends upon its action. 
We are commanded to turn our own cheek to 
the smiter, not the cheeks of those whose 
guardians we are pledged to be. To demand 
that a Christian nation ought not to claim its 
rights and to insist upon them is an utterly 
immoral demand. 

3. National morality is necessarily clogged 
by tradition. It must move slowly, because of 
the accumulated complexity of the legislative 
machinery, and the far-reaching relations of 
each enactment with ancient institutions in- 
volving innumerable individual cases. The 
individual is free, as the nation is not, to think 
out things for himself, to throw off custom and 
tradition, and to follow what new lines of guid- 
ance appeal to him as right. In this case it is 
well that the nation is thus hindered. At the 
present time we have a large number of clever 
and influential individuals thinking and writing 
rather wildly. The nation may be far behind 
the best of these in progressive morality, but 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 73 

at least its immobility is a defense against 
much dangerous and irresponsible experiment- 
ing. When men rush at high speed from 
one phase of morals to another, and write 
books in advocacy of each phase as they pass 
through it, it is just as well, for instance, that 
the marriage laws of England, unsatisfactory 
and unintelligent as some of them are, neverthe- 
less are slow to change. The complications of 
state legislation in America offer an interesting 
and relevant example here. Everybody knows 
the variety of local laws in the United States, 
which makes it extremely difficult for anyone 
crossing the continent to be sure that at all 
times he is keeping the commandments. Yet 
there is a very high value in this somewhat 
extraordinary state of matters, if we regard 
America as a great laboratory of legislation, 
out of whose countless experiments there will 
come moral wisdom for the future. 

4. By far the most important reason for the 
point for which I am arguing has still to be 
mentioned. It is the distinction between The 
State and states. I believe that it is loose 
thinking round about this particular point 
which is responsible for most of the confusion 
and much of the error which have characterized 
the discussion of this subject. Writers and 
speakers have been in the habit of talking 
about " The State " as if it were an entity as 



74 SOME ASPECTS OF 

clearly defined and as definitely understood as 
the individual. It has been supposed that 
" The State has no determinate function in a 
larger community, but is itself the supreme 
community, the guardian of the whole world 
and not a factor within an organized moral 
world. " From this it is but a step to Bern- 
hardi's position, that while the individual is 
responsible to the state, the state, being the 
highest social unit, is responsible to no one, but 
demands the utmost service and sacrifice from 
all individuals. 

The usual reply which has been made to 
this by Christian opponents is the question, 
— " Is there, then, no God to whom The 
State is ultimately responsible? " But that 
is not the matter at present before us. All 
such theory as this which we have quoted 
ignores the fact that The State, about whose 
powers and relations so much controversy has 
been waged, is a conception of purely imaginary 
existence. As a matter of fact, there is no such 
thing as The State except in the minds of 
theorists. The State for each man is really a 
state, namely his own nation and its govern- 
ment — Germany for the Germans, Britain 
for the British, America for the Americans. 
Public morality means for each individual the 
law of his own particular nation. There are 
other nations, some of them in rivalry with 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 75 

his own, and there is always the possibility 
of these rival national interests and principles 
bringing the world into a welter like the present. 
It is easy to say, " Let all such rivalries 
cease." But in dealing with rival states the 
problem is unfortunately more complex than 
that which arises between individuals. It is 
the duty of the individual to be friendly, 
humane, and generous to all; and he may 
find it to be his duty to sacrifice himself 
for his friend, or even for his enemy. But no 
such law of sacrifice can justly be applied to 
states. That is where all those are in error 
who, either in America or in England or else- 
where, have advocated the policy of throwing 
down defenses, abolishing navies, disbanding 
armies, and trusting to God. It is easy to 
be rhetorical about the nobility of perishing 
in such a cause, if matters came to the worst; 
but the fallacy which underlies the whole 
argument is precisely that of regarding sacrifice 
as a noble thing for a nation in the same way 
as it may be for an individual. Sacrifice for a 
nation may simply be breach of trust. The 
nation's first duty is to defend its people and 
their interests against the cupidity, fraud, or 
violence of other states. Carried to an un- 
intelligent extreme this view of national moral- 
ity will give you on the one hand the German 
maxim, " Live dangerously"; on the other 



76 SOME ASPECTS OF 

hand it will be expressed in such proposals as 
those made to the effect that German trade 
shall after the war be excluded from all markets 
of the world. No one is likely ever again to 
adopt the former proposal seriously. As to 
the latter, the futility of that ought to be ap- 
parent. Germany is a living national force 
demanding expansion. If you screw down the 
lid upon that boiler the future question is only 
one of time — the explosion is certain. 

But these extremes do not falsify the princi- 
ple which they exaggerate. While no state 
can be permitted to tyrannize over another 
state in such fashions as these, in virtue of its 
stronger power — that is, while there are 
limits beyond which the rivalry of nations 
must not be allowed to go — yet that rivalry 
is a legitimate and necessary fact which must 
be reckoned with in discussing national morality. 
The morality of The State is and must be the 
morality of a state, part of whose moral ob- 
ligations is to hold its own against other states. 
This is necessarily a lower standard of morality 
than that of the individual, who is, if he chooses 
to be so, free from such obligations. 

The sum of this whole argument is the 
proposition that the standards of public moral- 
ity are necessarily lower than those of individual 
morality, for these four reasons : 

(1) The state must legislate for the average 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 77 

man and not for the highest man, in order to 
carry out its essential principle that legislation 
must be the expression of the conscience and 
the will of the majority. 

(2) The state, being the trustee of its in- 
dividual citizens, must make the protection 
of their rights its first duty. 

(3) The state, being bound by traditions 
from which the individual is free, has not the 
same powers of immediate action in new direc- 
tions. 

(4) The State is really a state, whose obliga- 
tions are not those of private morality, but are 
defined partly by its relations to other states 
and its duty of defending the rights of its citi- 
zens against their aggression. 

All this must be taken into account when we 
are considering the present demand that we 
must Christianize the social order and bring 
the whole domain under the rule of Christ. 
To that demand every Christian must consent, 
but it must also be remembered that that 
demand does not and cannot mean that pre- 
cisely the same rules can at the present moment 
be applied to the public as to the private prob- 
lems of life. 

Well, let us face this situation. Here is 
the state, whose moral standards are neces- 
sarily lower than those of its best individuals 
and which is nevertheless invested with an 



78 SOME ASPECTS OF 

authority over these as well as over all others 
of its citizens. This authority is real, and 
admittedly legitimate and necessary. Without 
such authority the life of the community would 
be impossible, for its function is to insure justice, 
peace, and protection to the individual citizen 
and to defend his rights. But he who expects 
political and social benefits is bound to expect 
along with them corresponding political and 
social obligations. We cannot all have our 
own way independently, or else everything 
would at once fall into anarchy and chaos. 
Each must sacrifice something of what he con- 
siders to be the best way if there is to be cor- 
porate life at all. He may hold that the 
morality imposed upon him by the state is 
not so high as to reach his own individual 
standard, but it is in general his duty to work 
with it loyally, though for him it is but a second 
best. While he is accepting protection and 
other state benefits, it is in general his duty to 
be loyal to the state. He has, indeed, many 
other loyalties — to his party, his class, his 
trade union, etc., each in its own province — 
but he is immediately and primarily subject to 
the state, and must count that the first author- 
ity. The state cannot, indeed, control or alter 
his principles, but it can determine his actions. 
When his ideals are higher than the state's, 
he may still hold these, work for the propaga- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 79 

tion of them, and do all he can to leaven public 
opinion so that the state will ultimately adopt 
them. But meanwhile it is his duty in practice 
to subordinate private opinion to loyal service 
to the state. 

It is true that this obligation has its limits. 
On all questions of freedom in religious faith 
and confession, the battle has been fought out 
and won for the individual conscience. But 
beyond that there is a wide region within which 
the state may legitimately impose its inferior 
morality upon the higher individual conscience. 
A recent author has said that Christianity 
demands that no man do anything of which his 
conscientious judgment is not persuaded. This 
statement, however, undoubtedly needs qualifi- 
cation. A man may be persuaded that the 
drink traffic and war are immoral, and yet 
may be living in a land where he is forced to 
enjoy state benefits which are paid for by the 
customs and excise, and the protection of an 
army for whose maintenance he pays taxes. 
These are but two out of many instances in 
which the public welfare demands the sub- 
ordination of private views. We all have to 
work under many conditions which we would 
change if we had power to do so. Without 
that power, which rests on public opinion, any 
breaking off or mutiny is dangerous and may 
imperil the state. Open rebellion is justified 



80 SOME ASPECTS OF 

only in cases where it has sufficient backing to 
give it a reasonable chance of success; without 
such a chance it is simply murder and suicide. 
Private isolation is always dangerous, in that 
it weakens the general authority of the state. 
An individual confronted with such an alterna- 
tive must always ask, Which is the greater in- 
jury and wrong, to fall in with a course which I 
as an individual would not feel myself at 
liberty to take, or to injure or imperil the larger 
interests by disaffection? This is an entirely 
legitimate question, for morality is, so far as its 
detailed precepts go, essentially relative and 
not absolute. The mere act of killing, for 
instance, is in itself neither right nor wrong. 
In all ordinary circumstances it is wrong, but 
in self-defense or in the defense of one's wife and 
children it may become not only right but the 
most sacred of duties. In view of this fact of 
relativity, it becomes the more clear that in cer- 
tain cases where, in the interests of public wel- 
fare, the state requires action which would not 
have commended itself to the individual con- 
science, the individual may and ought to sub- 
ordinate his own opinions to those of the state. 
In further enforcement of this view it may 
be added that there is always the possibility 
that the conscientious opinion of the individual 
may be mistaken. In a pretty wide reading of 
the transactions of recent tribunals I have often 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 81 

been reminded of that old Scottish moderator 
who prayed, " O God, grant that we may be 
right, for thou knowest that we are very posi- 
tive/' Self-will is apt to personate conscience, 
and it can do this so subtly as to deceive the very 
elect. In an hour of conflict like the Great 
War, surely the moral issues are so stupendous 
that the individual objector may well pause 
before setting up his private judgment against 
the safety of his nation and the triumph of 
righteousness over unspeakable wrong. 

Hitherto we have been considering things as 
they are and have been : let us now turn to the 
consideration of things as they may yet become. 
In discussing the reasons for our assertion that 
the standards of public morality are lower than 
those of private morality we found the strong- 
est of these reasons to lie in the fact that there 
is no such concrete thing as The State, but only 
a state in rivalry with other states. Is there, 
then, no way in which it might be possible to 
materialize The State, and so, by removing or 
restricting the element of rivalry, to raise the 
standard of public morality toward that of the 
highest individual conscience? It is an ancient 
hope and a persistent one. Above all the 
actual states, with their allied or conflicting 
interests, floats ever the dream of the City of 
God, the ideal state. Plato's Republic, Augus- 
tine's City of God, More's Utopia, Bacon's 



82 SOME ASPECTS OF 

New Atlantis — these and many other such 
idealisms of the corporate life of men upon the 
earth have handed down the undying hope to 
those who to-day are attempting to forecast 
the reconstruction of society. Perhaps the 
most significant of them all is Dante's De Mon- 
archia, that great plea for a single universal 
temporal monarchy, coexistent with the spiri- 
tual monarchy of the church. It was his way 
of conceiving the true imperialism, supra- 
national and with divine sanctions — an im- 
perialism in which one nation should no longer 
grudge nor refuse the welfare of another nation, 
but all should cooperate for the larger well-being 
of the world. 

To-day that dream is again shining before 
the eyes of men. It has been conceived in 
vague and misty shapes, expressing itself, 
sometimes simply, in the cry for an end of 
wars. Again it would embody itself in such 
conceptions as a federation of European na- 
tions, a union of English-speaking peoples, an 
international police which shall limit arma- 
ments, and use force only to prevent any 
nation from preparing itself to break the peace 
and attack a weaker nation. Perhaps the 
most obvious form which it took was the sug- 
gestion that the entente cordiale and its allies 
should form themselves into a permanent 
nucleus ; and this developed into the still larger 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 83 

conception of a League of Nations, to which 
even Germany in time might come in, for the 
doing of justice and the consideration of claims. 
We shall deal with this subject in a later lec- 
ture. The War is over and the League is as 
yet an unrealized dream, although we have the 
promise, and some of us still have the hope, of 
its realization. Of one thing we may be very 
sure: national life and national moralities 
will remain, and patriotism will always be one 
of the supreme forces in the development of 
the human race. Yet, while that seems clear, 
it does appear to be possible that something 
larger may emerge, capable of restraining pa- 
triotism from its dangerous tendencies toward 
war, and at the same time capable of determin- 
ing international relations authoritatively. 

It is true that even in this supra-national 
center of authority the government will still 
remain " behind the soul of the people/ ' and 
public standards of morality will continue to 
be lower than those of the highest individuals. 
Yet, for the questions it has to decide, the new 
authority will be able to reach far nearer to the 
level of the individual conscience than any one 
state can possibly reach to-day. When state 
rivalry is eliminated from the highest authority, 
much that is noblest in the consciences of 
individual men will come to its own. In this 
way the conception of The State as the supreme 



84 SOME ASPECTS OF 

authority may be realized. It will not indeed 
be regarded as supreme in the sense in which 
Prussia conceived it, without reference to God; 
but it will be regarded as supreme in the sense 
that it will be subservient to God alone. It 
will not be supreme, as the Prussian state is, 
under the master idea of power, in consequence 
of which it became the monstrous and bloody 
idol in whose worship men and nations lost 
their souls. It will not even be supreme under 
the master idea of justice, as most states have 
professed to be in modern times. Love will 
be its master ideal. How such a future is to be 
brought about, it is not yet possible to prophesy, 
but it is surely high time to think. It does 
seem as if, in view of such hopes, we were mov- 
ing toward the fulfillment of the great promise 
that the kingdoms of the world shall become 
the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. For 
the Kingdom of Heaven in its ultimate realiza- 
tion is just a form of society in which the 
highest individual ideals are at last made ap- 
plicable to public institutions. 

The most important practical question for 
us all in this connection is the question, What 
are the forces that can be used to raise the 
standard of public morality nearer and nearer 
to the standard of private morality? And the 
answer is that if, along the whole line of our 
interests and efforts, we were all to take this 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 85 

as a conscious aim, there is not a single existing 
institution which might not be used as a means 
toward the desired end. As individuals we 
all have high responsibility for this, primarily 
by adopting the highest possible ideals for our 
own character and so indirectly leavening 
society, and then by propaganda which will in 
every legitimate way forward and spread those 
higher conceptions of life by which we, indi- 
vidually, have chosen to live. The church is 
supposed to stand for the highest idealism in 
the direction both of public and private charac- 
ter, but it would be well if the church were more 
consciously to adopt this policy, and to state 
more clearly both to itself and to the public 
its definite aim at the raising of public moral- 
ity nearer to the standards of private. The 
Church must ever work for the most part upon 
individuals. But it should bear in mind that 
the Government shall be upon the shoulder of 
its Lord. While, like its Master, it must often 
refuse to interfere in political disputes directly, 
yet it is its duty so to influence individuals as 
to bring His principles ultimately to bear upon 
the state. The press will always wield a mighty 
influence for good or evil in all such matters, 
and an incalculable amount of good might be 
done through the press if it were definitely to 
pledge itself to these aims. The newspaper is 
not a device for the amusement of the people, 



86 SOME ASPECTS OF 

a chessboard on which the game of popular 
politics is played. It is a wonderful instrument 
of education, which may, if it so choose, bring 
the noblest ideals home to the conscience of the 
nation. As regards the state, while it is true 
that legislation can never venture far above 
the average morality of the nation, yet it may 
always tend to go above rather than below that 
average. The State should be Adventurer as 
well as Administrator, within certain limits of 
possible advance. The temptation of all pol- 
iticians is to appeal to the baser side of their 
constituents, or at least to the side which is 
morally more commonplace and less ideal. 
They should regard themselves not merely as 
servants but as educators of the people; and 
in doing so, they will certainly be excused if 
they go judiciously beyond their election pro- 
grams instead of falling, as is so often the case, 
lamentably below them. Probably, however, 
the strongest of all the forces that may be used 
toward these high ends is that of education in 
schools and universities. We have seen in 
Germany but too terrible an example of the 
degradation of the standards of public morality 
being systematically carried on in an education 
which aimed at the fostering of the crudest kind 
of illegitimate patriotism. Let the schools 
give clear teaching upon this and cognate sub- 
jects, and set the mind and conscience of every 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 87 

adolescent citizen at work upon them, and 
there is no question that the distance between 
the standards of public and private morality 
might be enormously diminished within even 
one generation. 

In these and many other ways it is possible 
to go a great length in this direction, and no 
duty could be more pressing at the present time. 
There is, as we have stated, the most serious 
danger in attempting to force ideals; but there 
is an equally serious duty and necessity for 
cultivating them most assiduously. The King- 
dom of heaven is an ideal which tends to draw 
all men after it if their eyes are kept looking in 
its direction, and the supreme duty of all who 
have influence upon others of whatever kind 
is to direct their eyes thitherward. 

NOTE l 

In discussing the question of public and 
private morality we have presupposed the 
normal conditions of a time of peace. In war 
everything suddenly becomes abnormal. New 
moral values and judgments are introduced and 
old ones abrogated, so that in many instances 
the crimes of peace become the virtues of war. 
This need not surprise us. It is an axiom of 
ethics that all the detail of moral precepts is 
necessarily relative and dependent upon the 
circumstances of the case. In war many of 



88 SOME ASPECTS OF 

the relations of individuals to one another are 
reversed and abnormal, and the detailed appli- 
cation of the precepts of morality are changed 
accordingly. To bring about such a change 
is the heaviest moral responsibility possible to 
man. Those who provoke war, or wage it with- 
out moral necessity, are guilty of an unspeak- 
able crime. The rest must accept the situation 
for which the aggressor alone is responsible, and 
act on the new principles which it evolves. 

Yet here again the German habit of exag- 
geration must be combatted. War does not 
reverse all moral principles. There remains a 
morality of war. Germany has disavowed any 
such morality. She has swept the Ten Com- 
mandments and all the Christian virtues over- 
board, and boasted of the principle that any- 
thing is legitimate which leads to victory. 
That is the course which ruined Germany. We 
have seen that to legislate upon the standard 
of the idealists and saints is disastrous; but to 
legislate upon the standard of the criminals 
and moral degenerates is devilish. 

It is true that, in such an ethical upheaval 
as war produces, it is extremely difficult to 
draw the line and. fix the standard of the interim 
applications of morality to details. All pre- 
vious Peace Conferences and International Con- 
ventions have been trying to do this, with the 
curious result that they have given the impres- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 89 

sion rather of associations for redefining the 
rules of war than for establishing peace. All 
the results that they have achieved were calmly 
disregarded by Germany, who went on with 
her gas, her Zeppelin attacks upon civilians, 
her bombardment of unfortified cities, her 
sinking of unarmed ships, her inhuman cruel- 
ties practiced in the name of frightfulness, and 
her cynical dismissal of a sacred treaty under 
cover of the " Scrap of Paper " epigram. In 
this she was consistent in the thoroughness of 
her reversal of moral standards. Yet all the 
civilized world repudiates and disclaims her 
conception that war has no standards of mor- 
ality left to it at all. Where then can we find 
such standards? 

I believe we owe them to the playing grounds 
of our public schools. The one principle that 
remains firm in the hearts of all the noblest of 
the fighting men is that of sportsmanship. It 
is true that this will never yield a perfectly 
consistent code which may be written out in 
black and white, like the terms of an interna- 
tional agreement; yet it is to be remembered 
that in the whole of life such compromises are 
continually necessary. Life reaches out be- 
yond all our theories and judgments of it, and 
the only absolutely consistent persons are some 
of the inhabitants of our lunatic asylums, who 
carry their fixed idea ruthlessly out to its 



90 SOME ASPECTS OF 

furthest ends. The great principle of our boys' 
and young men's morality is that of playing 
the game. It is the one unfailing appeal to 
any audience of British or American young 
men. It is an unwritten law and probably an 
unwritable one. But it is deep in these na- 
tions' hearts. We were proud of it in the 
sports of former days, but we never dreamed 
that it would count for so much in the most 
tragic hour the world has ever seen. 

NOTE 2 

When we come to consider the League of 
Nations we shall see that that is the most 
considerable attempt that the world has ever 
made toward the realization of the ideal of 
drawing up the standard of public to that of 
private morality. We must not, however, 
count entirely to that agency, but must defi- 
nitely set before us the aim of this unification, in 
our education both in schools and universities, 
and as part of the new program of the church. 
The moral development of nations must ever 
be attained through the patient handling of 
individuals, until public opinion has been af- 
fected. Owen Wister and Benjamin Kidd 
have shown how amazingly the ideals of the 
German nation could be changed for the worse 
within one generation by systematic education. 
It must also be remembered that Prussia has 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 91 

had only two hundred years of civilization, as 
compared with the many centuries through 
which Britain and America have been learning 
the same lesson. Now, we must all together 
accept it for our steady aim, to work out high 
national ideals through individual consciences, 
by means of the inculcation of a high standard 
of honor in all the relations of life. Such ex- 
periments as the modern coordinate school and 
the Woman's Auxiliary Army Corps, which ap- 
peared to many conventional minds so daring 
as to be dangerous, have already proved them- 
selves extremely successful in introducing high 
standards as to the relations of the sexes. 
The system in schools and colleges which sub- 
stitutes, as far as that is possible, trust for 
supervision, has met with the same success. 
It is to be hoped that through these and similar 
agencies there may be implanted in the rising 
generation a contempt for " graft," and a sense 
of the vital necessity for honor whether it seems 
to pay or not, which may work wonders upon 
the public life of future days. All such at- 
tempts are bound to meet with opposition from 
people who will either say that this or that sys- 
tem has never been used before, or who will 
foredoom any such attempt by the dogmatic 
assertion that it will not work. To the former, 
one may reply confidently that if it were true 
that such attempts have not been tried before, 



92 SOME ASPECTS OF 

then the sooner they are begun the better; to 
the latter, pointing to the results of experiments 
already tried, we are able already to reply that 
such systems do work. 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 93 



CHAPTER IV 

A League of Nations 

The eyes of the whole world have been turned 
of late to the construction of a League of Na- 
tions, which would be the perfect realization 
of the conception of the state discussed in the 
last lecture, and the perfect form toward which 
all the minor attempts at that realization which 
we have already noted would finally merge. 
The Conference of Paris has come and gone, 
and the League of Nations is included in the 
Treaty of Peace. In the confused and tran- 
sition stage of the world's history through which 
we are passing, there is a widespread tendency 
to regard the League of Nations enterprise as 
a failure. Some look upon it as already a 
dream of the past, while others look forward to 
the future, expecting a speedy end to all its 
high-sounding promise. I am bold enough to 
believe that so far from being in any sense a 
failure, it has already been able to establish in 
the conscience of the world a new set of demands 
that shall never again be forgotten, and to point 
toward an altogether unprecedented set of pos- 
sibilities for the fulfiling of these demands. The 



94 SOME ASPECTS OF 

subject is, of course, an extremely wide one, and 
all that is proposed in this present lecture is to 
point out some general considerations which 
are apt to be overlooked, and yet without which 
the idea of the League cannot be understood. 
I shall not attempt to deal with the economic 
side of this vast question, but shall, rather, con- 
fine myself to that which directly concerns war 
and peace. The economic developments must 
largely be left to shape themselves as the need 
for such adjustment arises from time to time. 

The first thing to note about the League of 
Nations is that it is not only an unusual but a 
unique conception. By this I do not mean 
merely to reiterate the well-known words, 
" The world has dreamed of lasting peace 
before, but wishing for it is one thing, willing it 
another." Apart from this fact that the world 
has come to a further stage in the definiteness of 
its determination to achieve this thing and to 
achieve it now if it be possible, there are es- 
sential differences in the thing itself from any- 
thing else that has ever been before the judg- 
ment of the world. 

The issues are to-day at once simpler and 
more complex than they have been in any of the 
former various peace proposals and discussions 
that have taken place. All that has ever been 
said against an inconclusive peace holds good 
now. The terms of peace were indeed stern ? 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 95 

but not more so than was absolutely necessary, 
in view of the spirit of the enemy. Nations 
recover from great catastrophes, and there is no 
security for the future without the absolute 
defeat of that spirit in the Central Powers 
which was responsible for this war. When that 
spirit has changed, many things may be altered 
and many relaxations made; but until that 
change has taken place these would be not only 
premature but supremely dangerous. 

In considering the uniqueness of the present 
League of Nations we must also remember that 
this is not the time for following precedents but 
for making them. The hour of history and the 
conditions of the world are unique, and the 
arrangements which must be made for these 
must be equally so. We have not been fighting 
merely Prussian militarism, but the whole sys- 
tem of international diplomacy and ideals which 
has obtained throughout the past among Euro- 
pean nations. 

The League of Nations has sometimes been 
regarded as a repetition of the Holy Alliance. 
There is no ground for this whatever, except 
the entirely unreal one that both attempts 
claimed to have for their object the final ending 
of war. But the league which was formed after 
the fall of Napoleon by the sovereigns of Russia, 
Austria, and Prussia, had nothing in common 
with the present League. It was nominally 



96 SOME ASPECTS OF 

formed to regulate the relations of the states 
of Christendom by the principles of Christian 
charity, but it soon proved to have for its real 
object the preservation of the power of the 
existing dynasties. Its collapse and failure 
have no bearing whatever upon the fate of the 
present League. Again, General Smuts, be- 
fore he had accepted the League idea and 
worked it out into his very remarkable and 
able draft in detail, stated on one occasion that 
the British Commonwealth was the only League 
that has ever existed. As a matter of fact, the 
British Commonwealth is as radically different 
from the League of Nations as the Holy Alli- 
ance itself was. Again, in many utterances of 
distinguished men one has found statements 
to the effect that the nations included in the 
group of the entente and its allies, if they were 
to band themselves permanently together, 
would realize the idea of the League of Nations. 
Such statements are the result of an inadequate 
grasp of the unique elements in the present 
League, and they have thrown much confusion 
upon the whole subject. It is quite true that 
any such groups of nations as might be allied 
together in the British Commonwealth, or in 
the band of the entente and its allies, or in the 
English-speaking races, or in an alliance between 
America, France, and Britain, would be valu- 
able in the highest degree, but they would 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 97 

be valuable only as a basis for further and more 
complete union. If America, France, and 
Britain definitely set their hearts upon the 
realization of the League, it will at once 
become possible, and to the extent to which 
these three nations have accepted the idea 
it has become possible already ; but any partial 
alliance of whatever kind can only insure the 
possibility of permanent peace by leading on 
to that fuller union of the League of Nations 
which, as we have already said, is unique. 

The great question which the League is 
facing is the end of war. President Wilson 
has said that " The people of the world want 
peace, and they want it now," and has called 
the ending of war " This final enterprise of 
humanity." Wars have always hitherto ended 
in compromise, and it has been the chronic mis- 
take of nations and of men to imagine that that 
compromise was the final solution. In 1853 
there was a firm conviction in England that 
war was over forever. In 1854 the Crimean 
War broke out. Dr. Clifford has pointed to the 
failure of all those enterprises which in the 
past have sought to end war. Commerce has 
been again and again trusted to fulfill this end, 
and, in such conspicuous instances as the Cru- 
sades and the International Exhibition of 
1851, it has tended rather to create wars than to 
end them. Anarchism has been advocated by 



98 SOME ASPECTS OF 

Tolstoy and others as the one agent that can 
accomplish the great end, and the present 
tendency in some quarters is towards a colossal 
repetition of past experiments in anarchy. 
It is amazing that any intelligent man can 
look in that direction for such an end. The 
whole of history and the very make of human 
nature proclaim its futility. Disarmaments 
have been attempted in various nations, and 
international conferences such as that of The 
Hague have been held, but these were swept 
overboard by the great wave that broke in 
1914 upon the world. The lesson of all these 
facts is this, that " the one thing that will 
produce disarmament is a sense of security, 
and the League of Nations will produce that." 
It is for lack of a sense of security that all 
attempts to end war hitherto have failed, and 
nothing which is not able to restore and per- 
petuate that sense of security need attempt that 
mighty task. 

When we come to consider the League of 
Nations with a view to ascertaining what those 
elements are that make it unique, and encourage 
us to hope from it for results which no past 
attempt has been able to secure, we touch the 
heart of the whole business. It is free from all 
party cries of any kind, for it has been adopted 
by Laborists, Radicals, Old Liberals, Union- 
ists, and Conservatives in Britain, and by 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 99 

many of the leading minds, both Republican 
and Democratic, in America. Further, it has 
nothing whatever to do with the principles or 
the policy of pacifism, for its chief advocates 
have been men who not only believed that the 
Great War was the duty of the nations which 
sought to defend the liberties of the world, but 
actually undertook much responsibility for the 
management of that war. In one sense we are 
all pacifists. No sane man who knows the 
facts could be found who would advocate war 
as such, and who does not desire the final 
ending of it. But in another sense there are 
many of us who believe that pacifism has been 
among the greatest hindrances to peace that 
the world has had to reckon with, and that 
the War itself, as circumstances were at the 
time, was the only road by which the world 
could travel toward any peace which would be 
either just or permanent. 

The two main points on which to concentrate 
attention in seeking for the unique character 
of the League of Nations are: 

1. The Universal Pooling of International 
Interests. l 

1 The word " pooling " needs to be guarded from misunder- 
standing. It does not necessarily imply the merging of all 
the national interests and defensive forces, nor the removal 
of these from the command of the nations which contribute 
them. It means the uniting of them for a common purpose 
upon which all are agreed. 



100 SOME ASPECTS OF 

2. A Common Armed Force for Policing the 
World. 

1. The Universal Pooling of International 
Interests 
President Wilson said in Manchester that 
" the United States of America will join no com- 
bination of power which is not a combination 
of all of us." When he said that, it was im- 
possible for him or for anyone to foresee how 
very complicated and difficult a matter such 
a universal combination is. The lesson of the 
past months is not that it is impossible ever to 
hope for such, but a profound conviction that 
it must necessarily come gradually, and that it 
cannot by any possibility be rushed. While 
we fully admit that, and in virtue of it wait in 
hope for the ultimate consummation, yet we 
must not forget that until the League is com- 
plete and all civilized nations are included in it, 
it cannot really exist at all, nor can the results 
of its imperfect beginnings be fairly judged. 
Until all the peoples are united it cannot pos- 
sibly be safe to complete the work of disarma- 
ment. We all remember the groaning and 
dismay with which we viewed the spectacle 
year by year of enormously increasing arma- 
ments and saw no end to it except universal 
financial ruin or a stupendous war. The war 
has come, and it is to be hoped that the world 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 101 

has learned its lesson. If we are going to dis- 
arm, or even if we are going to cease the mad 
rivalry of former days in national armament, 
we must have security against aggression. All 
armaments are either a guard or a threat to 
frontiers. The one and only safeguard in 
this matter will ultimately be found to be the 
universal pooling of national armaments. 

This definitely implies that Germany sooner 
or later must be brought into the League of 
Nations. Until she and all other great na- 
tions have joined it, the League, as we have 
already stated, will not yet begin to exist. 
At the same time we must go on preparing for 
it. It cannot possibly be born in a day, but 
must come gradually and, as it were, piecemeal; 
and it will take great patience and calm wisdom 
of judgment to see this imperfect instrument 
gradually being constructed, and to expect from 
it little or no result until it is complete. 

For very obvious reasons it would be im- 
possible to admit Germany to it as yet. Under 
the old regime, Bethmann Hollweg on Novem- 
ber 9, 1916, said, " Germany is ready at all 
times to join the Union of Peoples and even to 
place herself at the head of such a Union as will 
restrain the disturber of peace " — a statement 
which being otherwise translated, meant sim- 
ply, " Will you walk into my parlor? said the 
spider to the fly." It is perhaps unnecessary 



102 SOME ASPECTS OF 

now to remind ourselves that this was the man 
who had already acquired notoriety as the 
author of the " Scrap of Paper " epigram. 
At the time when he uttered the proposal 
above quoted, Turkish Pan-Turanianism was 
destroying its million and a half of Armenians, 
preparations were on foot to carry Belgian 
citizens by the thousand into slavery, uni- 
versity students from Britain were already at 
work in German salt mines, and a virulent 
propaganda was being actively conducted both 
in Italy and America. The subsequent Brest 
Treaty showed the value of any such offer as 
Bethmann Hollweg's. The fact is that in that 
offer the German chancellor had not meant 
the same thing as the American President. 
It is well known that Germany has always 
hated internationalism in the past, and it 
is impossible to conceive imperial Germany 
in any true League of Nations. In 1918, 
Erzberger constructed a sketch of a League of 
Nations which would have satisfied him. That 
was just before the final defeat of Germany, 
and when it was examined it turned out to 
be no League of Nations at all, but simply a 
sketch of German terms of peace. 

Now, let us clearly face the situation. In 
such matters as these there can be no word of 
letting bygones be bygones. We are dealing 
with the most frightful dangers to unborn 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 103 

generations in every country, and any senti- 
mental forgiveness would be an unchristian 
and insane forgiveness. Here, as everywhere 
else, conversion must be demanded as a condi- 
tion of forgiveness. Nations may be converted 
as well as individuals. Germany was con- 
verted to the principles that led her to her doom 
within two generations, as we have seen. She 
must be brought back to such a state of mind 
as will make it either safe or righteous to en- 
trust her with the responsibilities of a place in 
the League of Nations, before any well-wisher 
to humanity could venture to propose her 
admission. 

There are, indeed, signs that such conversion 
has begun, and these should be welcomed and 
cherished in every possible way. The German 
people have discovered the delusions which 
had been put upon them, and there seems to be 
a very true reaction, accentuated by defeat and 
shame and a desire to think and act differently, 
on the part of some of her former spokes- 
men. When that is completed, when Germany 
has found a form of government which may be 
relied upon for future stability, and when the 
new Germany has given evidence of good faith 
and good will — then, and not till then, can the 
League of Nations be made complete. Sup- 
posing that in the meantime preparations for 
it have gone forward as they have already been 



104 SOME ASPECTS OF 

planned in Paris, we may hope that when the 
time shall come for the entrance of Germany, 
the League, including all the civilized nations 
of the world, will suddenly prove an effective 
instrument for guarding the world's peace 
forever. 

America also must come in. I am anxious 
to avoid all questions of American party pol- 
itics, but yet I trust I may be permitted to say 
a few words on this momentous question. For 
her own sake America must come in. She 
lives under the beneficent shadow of such men 
as Washington and Lincoln, and their spirit 
lives on in her. But these were men of the far 
horizon. They were not local politicians, but 
world-statesmen. It is impossible to conceive 
of these men staying apart from this universal 
ideal, which would make impossible for ever 
such evils as those which they devoted their 
lives to end. As to the future, no man can see 
far into the years, nor anticipate the destinies 
of nations. Yet certain it is that no land on 
earth can long remain in isolation. The dawn 
is ominous, and the morrow will bring new 
combinations and massed forces against which 
a united civilization must be prepared to stand. 
Even for her own sake America must come 
in — but how much more for the world's sake! 
No alliance which other nations might achieve 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 105 

could be effective without her. To tell the other 
allies to go on with the League of Nations upon 
their own account is to ask for an impossibility. 
Without America there can be no League of 
Nations. Its universality is its unique char- 
acteristic without which it can never exist. 

The reasons for America's hesitation are not 
only intelligible, but many of them are entirely 
reasonable. Any fair-minded judge can under- 
stand her reluctance to have European powers 
interfering with her action, say, in such affairs 
as her relations with Mexico. Still more can 
we understand her refusal to send troops across 
the world to aid in settling every little difference 
between European or Asiatic states. But all 
that is asked is that in case of local disputes all 
the world shall declare itself against the ag- 
gressor, not that all the world shall take action 
and resort to arms. In cases where the matter 
in dispute is small, there will be no call nor need 
for universal action: and if any matter should 
assume world-wide proportions, America will 
never hesitate to play her part. 

One sometimes hears phrases which are 
courteously intended, but which seem to me 
to be dangerous. Britain and her European 
allies are told that in their hour of need America 
was glad to come to their help, but now that 
the danger is over she would not further inter- 
fere with their affairs, but would retire and no 



106 SOME ASPECTS OF 

longer hamper them in their settlements. 
Americans! my brothers! when men talk like 
that I fear your courtesy more than I have ever 
feared your blame. This whole situation is 
misunderstood by such speakers, and they do 
not realize the meaning of the universal League. 
The League of Nations is not interference; it 
is the union of the world. 

As to the detail of possible joint action which 
may be involved, I do not wonder at your 
hesitation, especially as the decision has come 
upon you at so very difficult a time. No 
British man who knows the situation will 
misunderstand or grudge you the most volu- 
minous examination and discussion of the points 
involved. Viscount Grey's letter voices in 
magnificent clearness and truth the best mind 
and feeling of British men. As to the ultimate 
result of your deliberations I cannot and I do 
not entertain any doubt whatever. 

2. A Common Armed Force for Policing the 
World 
In the late war the nations came together 
for the defense of the world, each bringing as 
much as by the strongest measures it could 
induce or compel into its service. But how 
clumsy, how late, and how costly a business it 
all was! and, above all, how illimitable! Each 
nation stretched out after the last man she 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 107 

could secure, and no one knew how many 
would be needed before the end. The new 
idea which has come to us with the League 
of Nations is that it shall be made effective 
by a sea and land police force, armed with all 
the most powerful weapons procurable. Four 
things are necessary for this force. First, it 
must be made irresistibly strong, so that no 
private individual national enterprise would 
dream of competing with it. Second, it must 
be recruited by volunteers only, the volunteers 
being drawn from each nation up to the limit 
of a quota fixed by all. Third, munitions and 
arms for arming this force must be produced 
only in national arsenals, and all manufacture 
or sale of these by private firms or companies 
must be abolished. Fourth, the international 
police force must always be mobilized and 
ready to check the first beginnings of aggression 
upon the shortest possible notice. Such a 
police force would exclude national jealousy, 
for all interference with the existing conditions 
of any nation would be done at the initiative, 
not of a rival nation or group of nations, but of 
the world. 

Many points of difficulty confront the League 
of Nations, and we need not be surprised at 
that. Anything conceived on such a huge 
scale must necessarily be difficult. Where so 



108 SOME ASPECTS OF 

many minds and interests are involved, and 
so many men are educated and prejudiced in 
various opposing directions, we need not look 
for an easy task in the reconstruction of the 
world. On the whole the progress that has 
been made is surprising, and if people every- 
where will be patient and far-seeing enough to 
take the large view and concentrate on the 
essential elements, the thing may be done 
sooner than many of us expect. 

The first point of difficulty that used to be 
urged against it was the opposition of France, 
which was expected and prophesied. We need 
not now go into that belated subject further 
than to remind ourselves that it was looked 
upon by many as an insuperable barrier at the 
outset, and that it absolutely disappeared. 

The second point of difficulty was in con- 
nection with the strategic points of the world. 
Take the British strategic points for example. 
Under the conception of pooled interests and a 
limited international police, it might be ex- 
pected that Britain would be asked to give up 
her sole control of Gibraltar, Suez, and other 
such points, and it is difficult to see how a 
League of Nations could possibly be brought 
into being except upon a basis of the interna- 
tionalizing of these. In view of such a possi- 
bility it should be remembered that Britain 
is not asked to give up any such points to an- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 109 

other nation or to a group of nations, but to 
merge them in a supernational control in 
which she retains her own share. It would be 
impossible to bring forward any valid reason 
why this sacrifice, if it is to be regarded as 
sacrifice, should not be made. Nor would 
it be in any real sense a loss to Britain. From 
such points as the Rock of Gibraltar, much of 
their significance has already been taken away 
by the invention of aircraft and submarines. 
In regard to the surrender to the International 
League of the Suez Canal, it is to be remembered 
in compensation that the Kiel and the Panama 
Canals must come under the same principle of 
internationalization. In fact, on all such sub- 
jects we are apt to transfer to the details of the 
new situation, conceptions to which we have 
been accustomed under the old. Were the 
nations in rivalry as they are to-day, then no 
loyal British man would consent for a moment 
to the surrender of any strategic point: but 
if the world can be unified, and that unity 
permanently secured by the arrangements of 
this League, that alters the matter entirely. 
It would then be no longer in the interest of 
any nation to claim exclusive rights in the 
strategic points which were absolutely neces- 
sary to it of old. 

A third difficulty that has often arisen in 
the minds of men is that of the relative status 



110 SOME ASPECTS OF 

of the great navies of the world. In this re- 
spect our very victory has threatened British 
naval supremacy. It has been said, " If Brit- 
ain could write into international law the power 
of destroying hostile and neutral commerce, 
which it did in 1916, then no European power 
could dispute with her." The revelation that 
the British navy gave to Britain the power of 
life and death over other nations awakened 
the world to a new view of things which was 
extremely far-reaching and has already had 
consequences. To every naval power it may 
seem strange and disconcerting that the League 
of Nations should propose a pooled navy for 
the maintenance of the world's peace, in which 
it, like the rest of the powers, should only have 
a share. However large that share might be, 
some will fear that it could not awaken the 
sentiments which are so dear to seafaring na- 
tions and which have expressed themselves in 
so much of poetry and prose in their literature. 
But the facts must be faced. Without the 
League, in the rivalries of future years, one can 
only look forward to ruinous competition in 
rival shipbuilding for the purposes of war, 
whose immediate effect would be financial dis- 
aster, and whose ultimate end loses itself in 
sheer horror. Under the League each Power 
would require a naval quota proportionate to 
the demands of its physical and political geog- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 111 

raphy. Thus the naval requirements of each 
nation of the world would be limited within 
reasonable compass. There would be no rival- 
ries in shipbuilding, and yet the pooled navies 
would be amply sufficient for all possible con- 
tingencies that might ever arise. 

A fourth point of difficulty which has often 
been urged against the League of Nations is 
that of those who tell us that any such ar- 
rangement is going to substitute cosmopolitan 
for patriotic ideals. In a former lecture we 
have already discussed this point, and main- 
tained that patriotism must always remain 
the most powerful and commanding of large- 
scale social ideals. Among other reasons for 
this belief it was there stated that the cosmo- 
politan ideal gives us a unit too large and vague 
to raise anything equivalent to the enthusiasm 
associated with patriotic loyalty. Here it 
need only be added that there is no such abso- 
lute contrast between patriotism and cosmo- 
politanism as is sometimes supposed. The 
leading advocates of the League of Nations 
are among the foremost patriots of their time, 
and they evidently intend that the patriotic 
ideal must still remain strong as ever in the 
new cosmopolitan arrangement. Dr. Clifford 
has said that " each nation will remain inde- 
pendent, self-determining, sovereign and free, 
save in those matters expressly and freely 



112 SOME ASPECTS OF 

given up on entering the compact of interna- 
tional comity." In other words, the League of 
Nations proposes to pool the national interests 
only for specific purposes, and leaves the es- 
sential nationality of each intact. " The ques- 
tion is not really between nationalism and 
internationalism, but between disorderly and 
orderly internationalism." We have been try- 
ing in the past to solve international problems 
with national machinery, and that must always 
fail. By passing over to the international 
League some matters which were formerly 
nationally managed, we shall each surrender 
something, but we shall gain infinitely more, 
and all those causes which have incited pa- 
triotic loyalties in the past will continue to 
render his own country dear to every man of 
good will and right mind. The new arrange- 
ment will certainly cost each nation something, 
but sooner or later we must all learn that the 
words, " He saved others, himself he cannot 
save," apply to nations as well as to individual 
men; and it will ultimately be found that the 
only possible salvation, even for oneself, is 
to be achieved through the saving of others. 

As regards America, this aspect of the ques- 
tion presents some extremely difficult and in- 
tricate problems, bearing upon the Constitution 
of the United States. The new proposals have 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 113 

appeared to some to give ultra-democratic 
powers to America's representation in the 
League of Nations. It is not for me to express 
any opinion on such matters, which are outside 
my province or my knowledge. I admit that 
on such vital questions the utmost care and 
the fullest deliberation are imperative. Yet 
I may be permitted to remark that one of the 
chief glories of the League is its adaptability, 
and that some way can be found of so arrang- 
ing matters as to safeguard America from any 
such danger to her Constitution. Certainly 
you will not find us or any of your allies slow 
to understand the delicacy of the situation. 

But the end in view is so colossal, so vital to 
the well-being of every nation and of the world, 
that I am certain the true heart and resolute 
conscience of America will not fail to find means 
for so supreme an end. The world trusts you 
for this: it is the greatest trust that has ever 
been committed to you in all your history. 

After all these considerations have been dis- 
cussed there remains one which is in the end 
overwhelmingly the greatest point to be con- 
sidered on this subject: What is the alternative 
to the League of Nations? We admit that be- 
fore the League can come into operation it will 
have to encounter immense difficulties, but 
this is a case in which huge difficulty is con- 
fronted by blank impossibility. Without the 



114 SOME ASPECTS OF 

League, the situation of the world is absolutely 
desperate. In the first place there are such 
considerations as those which have been already 
touched upon regarding the rivalries between 
the navies of different nations, and the ruinous 
cost of competition in construction. Then 
there are many side issues, like that, for in- 
stance, of Zionism, and the occupation of 
Palestine by the Jews. It is probable that 
some arrangement will be made whereby 
Mr. Arthur Balfour's forecast will be fulfilled, 
in which he gave his sanction to the prospect of 
a national settlement of the Jews in Palestine. 
This cannot, of course, mean that all the 
thirteen and a half millions of Jews will remove 
to Palestine and occupy its territory, but it 
probably will mean that Jerusalem will become 
in some sort the Jewish headquarters for the 
world, uniting the scattered fragments of 
Judaism not only into a religious but a political 
whole. Palestine is the focus of the world 
geographically. It is the center whence Jewish 
influence in future days could immediately 
touch all the continents of the eastern hemi- 
sphere. A concentrated national power, backed 
by the enormous wealth which would be repre- 
sented by the Jewish headquarters at Jerusalem, 
might easily become a grave menace to the 
future peace of the world. Various safeguard- 
ing measures have been proposed, but it is very 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 115 

questionable whether these would have any 
adequate or permanent power to check such 
dangers as might arise. Under a League of 
Nations a concentration of Jewish influence in 
Palestine would be safe, because it also would 
form part of the League, and would share with 
the rest of the nations at once their responsi- 
bilities and their limitations. Without that 
we might soon find that we were facing a new 
and serious danger. 

The insidious and almost world-wide spread 
of Bolshevism is another fact that must be 
reckoned with in the immediate future. It is 
a secret power, as yet little known. On the 
one hand it is feared by many as a power that 
threatens life, liberty, and humanity in general. 
On the other hand many welcome it as the 
liberator of the world. For my own part, with- 
out necessarily fixing upon the whole system 
the worst crimes which have been committed in 
its name, it appears to be a system under 
which the powers of government are com- 
mitted to those elements in the community 
which are least qualified to use them in- 
telligently. Of this at least there can be no 
question, that at the present time it is an inter- 
national and world-wide influence. As yet it 
can only be dealt with in each nation according 
to that nation's lights and powers. There is no 
unity in the world's attitude to it or plan for 



116 SOME ASPECTS OF 

dealing with it. Surely, it is evident that the 
only way in which the world can either judge it 
justly or defend itself against its attack, must 
be by some international and world-wide in- 
stitution such as the League of Nations. 

There is also the question of the next war. 
Mr. H. Stead has quoted responsible opinion 
to the effect that the expenditure upon arma- 
ments after the Great War will be ten times 
as large as it was before. We have already 
touched upon this often but it is impossible to 
give any adequate conception of the meaning of 
it. Without the League of Nations, the next 
war will come. There is no alternative what- 
ever between universal disarmament to the ex- 
tent which the League proposes, and ultimate 
war. The status quo is not now a living alterna- 
tive : it cannot be maintained for a day. But 
if a next war does come, it will be beyond all the 
power of words to describe its horror. It has 
been said that " another world-war would 
mean the extinction of civilization,' 7 and the 
words are not too strong. Science has not 
completed its work in rendering war terrible. 
When the armistice was proclaimed, it seemed 
that science was only on the threshold of infinite 
discoveries in destruction. The League of 
Nations bristles with difficulties, but surely 
there is no one, unless he be possessed with 
suicidal mania, who would not prefer to 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 117 

accept it, however difficult, rather than to 
accept the destruction of the world. Now 
is the moment, as Viscount Grey has said, 
when " the world must learn or perish. " The 
prospect is more dismal than Dante's Inferno, 
if wars are to go on increasing in ferocity 
upon the earth. For such a life it is not 
worth while to breed children in any land. 
It was well worth while to breed them and 
send them forth upon one glorious sacrifice 
which would save the world to the end of time; 
but if that sacrifice is to be in vain, and the 
destruction of each generation in its youth is 
to be the normal and continually repeated 
prospect of our homes, then it were better that 
the race should perish at once from the earth. 
There is a danger to-day of our having the 
trophies of victory, but the battle lost. Those 
who will think carefully over the present situa- 
tion will agree with Sir Edward Grey that " the 
past struggle is in vain if the League of Nations 
is not secured." Therefore this League is in 
the strictest sense practical politics; indeed, 
it is the only practical politics before the judg- 
ment of the world. In December, 1918, Mr. 
Wilson said in London that while at first he had 
been accused of being academic in his interest in 
the League, now we find the practical leading 
minds of the world determined to get it. No 
such constancy and unity of purpose has ever 



118 SOME ASPECTS OF 

been witnessed in the world before. As time 
goes on we see more clearly the new difficulties 
and complexities that arise, but it is our first 
duty not to let these arising difficulties blind 
our eyes to the momentous issues which we 
are facing in the immediate future. 

It is, however, in connection with Christian- 
ity that we reach the highest ground for con- 
sidering the League of Nations. The Prince 
of Peace is still the Lord of the world, and it is 
in the light of his will that all considerations of 
peace must finally be judged. Had the church 
demanded a patched-up peace, as some claimed 
that she ought to have done, during the last 
five years, she would have betrayed Chris- 
tianity. Now she will betray it if she does not 
forward the influence of the League of Nations, 
for this is essentially a Christian ideal. Indeed, 
it is the only Christian ideal before us at the 
present time. The spirit expressed in the 
balance of power and in secret diplomacy was 
essentially a selfish and unchristian spirit, 
which every now and again suddenly revealed 
itself as an unblushing worship of the devil. 
We have experimented with all the ideals of 
paganism. In the League of Nations we are 
coming back at last to Christ, to see whether 
the world may not learn of him. As we shall 
see in a future chapter, the League of Nations 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 119 

indorses the wider church outlook which has 
long been expressed in her foreign mission 
enterprise. The alternatives before the world 
are either Christ or a godless civilization, which 
is infinitely worse than any heathenism. The 
League of Nations definitely accepts the golden 
rule as the law of its being and the object of its 
labors. One of your countrymen has said, " We 
are actually adopting the ideal of the world- 
wide Kingdom of God as a national policy, 
pledging our Republic to the unselfish teachings 
of the Son of Man." There never was a time 
when Christianity had so remarkable an indorse- 
ment from the best political authorities as 
today. In theory the church has given her 
sanction. Now is the time for practice. If she 
is to show herself a living force in the present 
generation, she must not only agree to but must 
champion this great ideal. 

Against all this it is sometimes urged that 
the tendency to war is characteristic of human 
nature, and that on this account there is no 
real chance of the end of wars upon the 
earth. Longinus long ago asserted that " strife 
is good for mortals," and Bernhardi has most 
abundantly indorsed his statement. There will 
always be two types of mind upon this subject. 
It has been said that to Napoleon war was a 
splendid game, while to Wellington it was a 
stern duty to be got through as quickly as 



120 SOME ASPECTS OF 

possible. But that it is an essential element in 
human nature, which can never be eradicated 
or replaced, is an assertion which runs contrary 
not only to the whole genius of Christianity 
but to any scientific view of the evolution of 
the race. To those who on any ground believe 
in an ultimate decency of things, war is neces- 
sarily doomed. To those who believe in an 
intelligent and realizing way in Christianity, 
the question resolves itself into a very simple 
issue. We may grant a certain truth to the 
assertion that war is inherent in human nature, 
which derives this among its many mingled 
inheritances from the brute; but we must ask 
the further question, Is Christ or is he not a 
match for human nature? Can he manage it, 
and lead it out from the slime of its origins 
into the nobility of its destiny? Upon that 
question depends our belief in the failure or 
success of Christianity. For believers in Christ, 
to ask that question is already to answer it. 
We have ground for believing that there is a 
limit to the reign of brute human nature, that 
Christ transcends it, and that His ideals, which 
have already conquered its cruder forms, will 
ultimately triumph over all things and lead 
mankind out into the glory and nobility of the 
sons of God. 

Hitherto we have only treated of the League 
of Nations on its negative side, as a movement 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 121 

which has for its object the end of war. It 
remains to be pointed out that this is by no 
means its only content and intention. In its 
positive, as contrasted with its negative as- 
pects, it has still a closer alliance with Chris- 
tianity. No Christianity which is merely 
negative is worthy of the name. Christ's 
great contention with the Pharisees was for a 
positive as contrasted with a negative faith. 
To be a Christian is not to be a man who does 
not do this and that, although there have been 
those whose main idea of Christian manhood 
was a catalogue of things which it would not 
permit a man to do. It is only when we come 
past the negative out into the positive side of 
Christianity that we see it in its rich fullness 
and promise; and, all along the line, the League 
of Nations strives to keep pace with it in this. 
It aims not merely at the end of war between 
nations, but at the establishment of love and 
good understanding. Intelligently conceived, 
it deals not merely with alliances and treaties, 
but with the spirit which underlies all such 
agreements. It would establish good will as 
the foundation of all relations, and it would 
interpret the brotherhood of nations, not 
merely in the sense of tolerance and the absence 
of aggressive wrong-doing, but as a positive 
friendship and intercommunion for the purposes 
of mutual aid and the furtherance of each 



122 SOME ASPECTS OF 

other's interests. One of the consequences of 
this positive spirit is that it proposes to deal 
with the economic and industrial problems of 
the world, and to deal with them from this 
point of view. In all these ways it is seeking 
not a negative end merely, but the positive 
establishment of good relations; and in doing 
this it is showing itself to be imbued with the 
essential spirit of Christianity as revealed by 
Jesus Christ. 

It will be obvious that the task it has set 
itself is indeed a most comprehensive and far- 
reaching one. It is no wonder if, with such 
ends in view, the new order will take some 
time to find itself and establish its position. 
When one feels overwhelmed and discouraged 
by the thought of so gigantic a program, it 
is a comforting reflection that the League of 
Nations is not conceived as a thing fixed and 
stationary. Lord Robert Cecil has pointed 
out one of its greatest merits, in his explana- 
tion that it is an elastic conception, which may 
be modified so as to deal with new situations 
and requirements as they arise. Its first task 
will probably be to codify international law in 
a more complete and authoritative fashion 
than that in which it has been already codified 
by Fiore or by Borchard or by The Hague Con- 
ferences of 1899 and 1907. Even if its codifica- 
tions were complete — which they are not — 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 123 

they would still remain in need of sanctions 
which would be able to enforce them. Such 
sanctions the League of Nations provides, as 
we have already seen; and its elasticity enables 
it to face the future in the confidence that, as 
new contingencies arise, it will be able in 
virtue of its universality and its safeguards to 
face these also. 

There are some who imagine that they have 
only to speak the word " Utopia " in order 
to discredit any such scheme as this. Their 
attitude has perhaps been provoked by those 
who have in the past coquetted with ideals, 
and recklessly uttered high-sounding words. 
Utopia may either stand for cv twos or ov toVos — 
" the place of well-being " or " the place that 
does not exist." For my part I am not afraid 
of the word, nor of the power of God in his prov- 
idence to call things that are not as though they 
were, and so to create them. When in faith 
Christian men are sufficiently daring to trust 
God to that extent, they will certainly have 
their reward. One remembers the words of 
Cleon, that Paul's doctrine " could be held by 
no sane man"; and one remembers also that 
the madnesses and the wildest idealisms of an 
age live on, while its practical sanities and 
materialistic politics die daily into oblivion. 
In any case, this League of Nations is the 
greatest act of faith the world has ever seen, 



124 SOME ASPECTS OF 

for it believes that Christ's kingdom is an ever- 
lasting kingdom, and that his dominion is to all 
generations. It has dared to believe in the 
power of Jesus Christ. 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 125 



CHAPTER V 

Statesmanship in Foreign Missionary 
Work 

In the bewildering number and rapidity of 
the changes that have come over every aspect 
of modern life, none is more striking and none 
will ultimately show more far-reaching results, 
than the transformation of our view of Foreign 
Missions. A few years ago foreign missionary 
enterprise belonged to the region of sentiment: 
now it has been transferred to that of states- 
manship. Formerly Christian thought wan- 
dered out in a romantic and irresponsible way 
among lands far distant, and the result was 
infinitely picturesque, but in many cases it 
was hardly taken seriously beyond the inner 
circles of the devout. Somewhere in the in- 
finite distance there was a missionary, dressed 
in clerical garb, sitting under a palm tree with 
black gloves and a Bible, surrounded by a 
touchingly grouped band of more or less naked 
savages. Piety was graded then, as it is still 
in many quarters, and the picture of the mis- 
sionary under his tree appealed only to 
extremely religious people. To the ordinary 
man, who was religious enough to satisfy his 



126 SOME ASPECTS OF 

conscience along the usual lines, this was en- 
tirely a work of supererogation. To-day every 
intelligent believer in Christianity knows that 
such a view as that is not only unchristian but 
is also obsolete. He knows also that mere zeal 
is not all that is required for effective work in 
the foreign field, nor is he much moved by such 
curious motives as the desire to hasten the end 
of the world and the coming of Christ by com- 
pleting the preaching itinerary of the world. 
Instead of that he takes foreign missions 
seriously as a necessary department of all real 
statesmanship. 

Statesmanship means neither more or less 
than common sense upon a large scale. Its 
fundamental demand is a clear view of all 
things of which it takes cognizance. Pfleiderer 
has said that " in order to conquer the world the 
first thing necessary is to get a correct view of 
the world, " and it is this which modern foreign 
missions accept as their first task. In 1899, 
the late Dr. Stewart of Lovedale, then modera- 
tor of the Assembly of the Free Church of 
Scotland, advocated, in his moderatorial ad- 
dress, what he called a " policy of missions. " 
The phrase created much interest at the time, 
but the majority of those who heard or read 
his speech confessed that they did not fully 
understand what he meant by it. The great 
Missionary Conference of 1910 helped to clear 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 127 

up the situation, and interpreted much that 
he had advocated; and since then it has been 
gradually dawning upon Christian men every- 
where that the foreign mission enterprise must 
be accepted as a definite policy and reckoned 
with in the statesmanship of the world. 

The first aspects of any such view as this 
must concern certain questions of detail. 
In the first place, in the choice of the field we 
have to distinguish between races that have a 
future before them and races which are obvi- 
ously dying out. The means of reaching the 
population of the world with Christian propa- 
ganda are lamentably limited, and since we 
cannot at the present time hope to reach all, 
we must select those among whom we shall 
labor. Under these circumstances it is neces- 
sary to consider the future value of the various 
races. Work among those which are soon to 
become extinct has been, and is, heroic in the 
last degree; but statesmanship demands that 
the gospel shall be sent to the fountainheads 
of future civilization, and to lands which will 
in a generation or two exercise the strongest 
influence upon the world. If it be objected, 
as it used to be, that there is an irreverence in 
counting heads in this fashion, surely the 
answer is clear enough. As individual souls 
all men may be equally valuable to Christian- 
ity; but, as a mere matter of numbers, is it 



128 SOME ASPECTS OF 

not wiser and more effective to win ten thousand 
people for Christianity than ten? And, as 
those who are employing foreign missions as 
an instrument of the Kingdom of Christ, must 
we not see to it that that instrument is employed 
in the places where it will ultimately do most 
work? 

A second matter of detail is the choice of 
missionaries. In the days when missions were 
a sentiment the only requirements for a foreign 
missionary's career were piety and zeal. But, 
when one comes to reflect upon it, it is surely 
obvious that the work of a foreign missionary 
is one of the most highly specialized of all the 
professions, and that further qualifications are 
necessary to insure fitness for effective work in 
it. The only reasonable principle upon which 
a man should choose his lifework must be his 
fitness for the special lines and tasks which he 
purposes to face. It is better to sweep a cross- 
ing perfectly than to preach a crusade badly, 
for the world is permanently benefited only 
by those labors, of whatever sort, which are well 
performed. In making the choice of a profes- 
sion many things must be taken into account, 
but the paramount consideration must be the 
call of God as revealed in the nature, the tastes, 
and the powers of the individual for work 
along particular lines. Anyone who knows the 
history of foreign missions must see how widely 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 129 

this principle is proved by the effect of mission 
work upon the workers. There have been 
those who found in the foreign field that they 
had no special aptitude for the work they had 
undertaken; and it would be impossible to 
imagine circumstances more terrible in their 
discouragement, or lives more shattered in 
their adventure, than foreign missionaries who 
discovered too late that they were equipped 
only with zeal and not with fitness for their 
difficult and complicated task. On the other 
hand, who does not know of the magnificent 
effect in character which is produced by foreign 
mission work upon those who prove really fit 
for it? Men and women who previously had 
shown no very distinctive gifts, have in count- 
less instances developed into superb evangelists, 
surgeons, explorers, educators, and administra- 
tors, as they rose to the opportunities given 
to their latent powers, and proved their fitness 
for the enterprise they had undertaken. Lines 
are drawn deep upon such faces, for their work 
is arduous and exacting, but they are the lines 
of greatness of manhood and womanhood. 

Third, a very essential part of statesmanship 
in the whole business of foreign missions is 
that of patience. There has sometimes been 
a craving for immediate results which has 
brought disappointment abroad and criticism 
at home. The statistics of conversions and 



130 SOME ASPECTS OF 

baptisms are no sort of measure of the effective- 
ness of the work achieved. In many lands the 
baptism of a convert has meant his ostracism 
and has deprived him of any means of making 
a living, yet complaints have been made that 
an insufficient number of conversions were 
tabulated in the returns sent home. It is 
extraordinary that it did not strike the critics 
that it would be wise in such lands to provide 
agencies whereby converts could be assured of 
a living and kept from starvation. The con- 
sequence in such cases has been that countless 
conversions have been achieved while no open 
profession was made. As one missionary has 
put it, " Many a Christian will rise in the last 
day from a Mohammedan grave." It was with 
such things in mind that Jesus spoke of his 
doctrine and kingdom as leaven working 
secretly and unobserved, but yet eventually to 
leaven the whole lump. There are many kinds 
of lie, but everybody knows that statistics may 
easily be the very worst kind of all, and it is 
well that all who are interested in foreign mis- 
sions should remember that. One of the most 
touching of all missionary stories is one con- 
cerning the late Master of Balliol. A certain 
Geronimo of Genoa, having heard that the 
Australian aborigines were the lowest type of 
savages of the earth, went out and worked 
among them for twenty years without making a 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 131 

single convert or even an approach to one. 
The story was told to Dr. Jowett, and he re- 
plied very earnestly, " I should like to have 
been that man." 

A fourth consideration is the necessity for 
distinguishing between causes and effects, and 
putting the stress of our work upon the former 
rather than the latter. Heathenism, with all 
its miseries and superstitions, is due to certain 
easily ascertained causes. The peoples are 
perishing from lack of knowledge, and from 
lack of ability to deal with existing conditions. 
The practical intelligence and directed will of 
such peoples have never been trained to play 
upon their life as it actually is, and the whole 
superstitious incubus of heathenism is the 
result. This fact should give us the point of 
view from which to look at educational and 
medical missions as agencies in the foreign 
field. There is a tendency to consider these as 
more or less secular, and to set up over against 
them the purely evangelistic missions as the 
ideal type. But in a land of gross ignorance 
and universal unhealed sickness, the evangelis- 
tic mission is to a large extent dealing with 
results while the causes remain untouched. 
It is a profound mistake to imagine that educa- 
tional and medical work is to be regarded as in 
any sense a bribing of the people to come and 
receive religious instruction, by offering them 



132 SOME ASPECTS OF 

benefits which they can understand. These 
are really no bribes, but the direct attack upon 
the causes of heathenism; and they should in 
every case be encouraged to go hand in hand 
with the evangelistic teaching which they are 
rendering possible and fruitful. 

The fifth matter which must be included in 
this survey is the necessity for appreciating the 
value of pagan worship. To laugh at it, to 
rail at it, or still worse to ignore it, is fatal 
policy. To regard it as the work of devils is 
to be ignorant of human nature and the origins 
of human faith. It is not in vain that centuries 
of worship, however mistaken or imperfect, 
have engaged the heart and mind, and, to some 
extent, the conscience, of all the races of man- 
kind. None of the races has lived in vain, and 
none has worshiped in vain. Each has dis- 
covered something in its worship which has 
increased its national value and its spiritual 
wealth. We in the restless and hurrying 
West, where peace in any deep sense has almost 
died out, may well turn with a sigh to the calm 
that still broods over the Eastern mind. We 
who have ceased to wonder at anything, sated 
with the miracles of modern science, may well 
view with reverence the spectacle of childlike 
peoples who wonder at everything. We with 
our Western commercialism may surely con- 
fess that we have something to learn, of beauty 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 133 

and gentleness and simplicity, from nations 
less fortunate in respect of positive faith. In 
a word, our task is not to bring God to foreign 
countries in our ships, but to find Him there 
already, and to reveal him to those children of 
His to whose homes we go. We should intro- 
duce Christ to them as the true Interpreter of 
their own ideals, the Appreciator of their own 
endeavors in the religious life. We are not 
there to westernize the East, as if Jesus had 
said, " Suffer the little white children to come 
unto me." We are there to fulfill rather than 
to supplant the imperfect life of pagan lands, 
to show them by their very virtues and beauties 
the sad and tragic lack and failure that are 
theirs, and to supply that lack out of the fullness 
of Jesus Christ. 

No point of view is more easily parodied 
than this. " Quite so," says a certain type of 
man. " Let us appreciate the reality of all 
religions, and leave each nation to its own — 
Buddhism for the Buddhist, Mohammedanism 
for the Mohammedan, Christianity for the 
Christian." I need not say that the apprecia- 
tion of other religions of which we have spoken 
does not mean this, or any other such cheap and 
foolish thing. The whole difficulty, and yet 
the whole value, of thought on such subjects, 
lies in fine distinctions which require a certain 
delicacy of mind and a certain amount of pains- 



134 SOME ASPECTS OF 

taking thought to make and to preserve. It is 
one thing to say that the religion of each land 
has a value of its own, and it is quite another 
thing to say that the religion of any land is 
sufficient for the spiritual needs of men. There 
is nothing comparable with Christ in all the 
world, and the more precious any substitute 
for him is, the more imperatively do we hear 
the cry of the human heart for just that which 
He alone can give. Christ is not a rival of the 
gods of the lands, to be weighed over against 
them as greater or lesser than they. Literally, 
" He judgeth among the gods," as the old 
phrase has it; and among them, as among 
men, he comes for Kpib-is. In his light we see 
the relative worth and beauty of the various 
heathen cults, and the same light that shows 
us their beauty shows us also the deep defects 
of each one of them. 

The trouble with them all is this, that their 
conception of the Highest has become localized, 
and so, hopelessly dwarfed. The curse of 
heathenism everywhere is the curse of local 
gods. The consequent religion is bound to be 
petty, wanting in imagination, and full of the 
immorality of a favoritism which can be se- 
cured by bribes or lost by giving offense to the 
touchy gods. The great business of the Chris- 
tian missionary is to delocalize the gods of the 
heathen, and to reveal instead of them the 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 135 

one God over all, blessed forever, revealed in 
Jesus Christ — in Jesus Christ, who is neither 
a child of the East nor the West, but is the Son 
of Man forever. Seen thus in His light, it is 
safe to gather and preserve the true and beau- 
tiful elements in all attempts at worship, and 
it is easy to reinterpret these in a nobler and 
more helpful way than had been possible in any 
heathen worship. 

Turning now to the more general considera- 
tion of our subject, we find that the war has 
complicated the whole problem of foreign mis- 
sions in many ways. It has been said often 
that it must necessarily have presented a very 
perplexing spectacle to heathen lands. Chris- 
tianity had come among them as a gospel of 
peace, and had set itself on every mission sta- 
tion to end family disputes and tribal feuds. 
It seems natural to ask and difficult to answer 
what justification will be possible for the church 
to present to heathen men who are perplexed 
by the spectacle of a war between Christian 
lands, compared with which the most violent 
of their native conflicts have been but children's 
games. Yet, on the other hand, it must be re- 
membered that we are apt to underrate the in- 
telligence of pagan minds. The non-Christian 
troops at the front understood quite well the 
meaning and necessity of the war, and the spec- 



136 SOME ASPECTS OF 

tacle of it presented no difficulty to them. They 
had not accepted our teaching, but they under- 
stood that we were fighting for that which we 
had taught, and that our entire warfare was in 
order to preserve alive the principles of Chris- 
tianity upon the earth. Indeed, the chief 
difficulty and stumbling-block of this kind 
which has presented itself to the pagan mind of 
modern times has not been the Great War, 
which was fought for obvious and unques- 
tionable principles. It has been the war 
which, in its incessant guerrilla fashion, unfor- 
tunately has been waged between certain of 
the Christian churches on the mission field. We 
may trust the intelligence of mankind to under- 
stand the Great War, but what reason is there 
why they ought to understand any worthy 
principle in that infinitely little war? Punch's 
famous picture of half-naked savages singing 
their own version of Handel's great anthem, 
" Why do the Christians rage so furiously 
together? " is one which ought to cause in- 
tolerable shame to every Christian heart. 
Any bitterness between Christian people in 
foreign lands, or any strife either upon ec- 
clesiastical or individual grounds among mis- 
sionaries, is capable of undoing years of patient 
labor in the building up of faith; and any states- 
manlike view of the foreign mission enterprise 
of to-day must necessarily view with the stern- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 137 

est condemnation the pettiness and dispro- 
portion which have sometimes characterized 
the church's handling of ecclesiastical ques- 
tions on the foreign field. 

One effect of the war has been the broadening 
of the horizons of the average man. Young 
men who in former days would have lived and 
died without visiting any lands but their own 
have now learned something at least of the 
width of the world, and the spirit of adventure 
has come upon them. It must be this which 
is accountable, in part at least, for the extremely 
interesting fact that the soldiers in the allied 
armies so often manifested an interest in 
foreign missions. Few men would have ven- 
tured to think beforehand that a missionary 
address would be welcomed in a hut or camp : 
yet there was no kind of lecture to which they 
would listen with greater eagerness. The 
reason for this must have been that they had 
already seen a wider world, and come to be- 
lieve that there actually were heathen lands. 
They had now met and fought side by side with 
men who worshiped strange gods, and the whole 
fact of paganism, instead of being a fairy tale 
of parsons, had exhibited itself as an actual 
piece of the live world which passed before their 
own eyes. 

On a colossal scale the lands have mingled. 
At the moment when men of Christian lands 



138 SOME ASPECTS OF 

have been taken out by the million into a 
nearer contact with heathen countries, these 
countries have wakened into a totally dif- 
ferent life of ideals and of prospects from that 
which they ever had before. Even before the 
war the world was wakening. China was trying 
to waken, stretching her hands and opening 
her eyes for a moment, as it were, after the 
long deep sleep of centuries. Japan was 
already broad awake, and most keenly alive 
to her own secular interests. India was be- 
ginning to put in her claim for a larger and 
fuller development of self-government and 
native rule. The Mohammedan world was 
already the most active missionary force on 
the face of the earth, and was propagating 
the faith of the Prophet in many lands with a 
thoroughness and success which were bound to 
have serious consequences in the future. While 
these things were going on, commerce and 
diplomacy, easier means of travel together with 
swifter means of communication, were linking 
up the world into one, and making it impossible 
for any man anywhere to be completely inde- 
pendent of any other man. As the result of 
all these forces, the phenomena of the Crusades 
and the Renaissance were being repeated and 
exaggerated before our eyes. New govern- 
ments were rising upon all sides, most of them 
premature and all of them precarious. It 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 139 

took Britain more than a thousand years to 
bring her parliamentary system to its present 
very imperfect condition, but nation after na- 
tion of the Near and Far East leaped for 
the top of the ladder, and imagined it could 
manage parliamentary government by a mere 
decree. In every case it turned out that the 
ancient East had adopted the methods of the 
West too suddenly, and had failed with them. 
But that does not mean that the failure must 
necessarily be permanent, or that some adapta- 
tions of the one form to the other may not end 
in a stable constitution. As we have seen 
before, great civilizations have already risen 
at the meeting-points of East and West, and 
this may prove to be the case again on a scale 
hitherto unparalleled. We had entered upon 
a period which was essentially creative, when 
the Voice which sounded over all the lands kept 
repeating the solemn words, " Behold, I make all 
things new." 

Such judgments of the importance of one's 
own generation are apt to be exaggerated. 
Every day and period bring novelties to those 
who live in it, and because they have not seen 
such things before, they hail them as the very 
Day of Judgment and the restitution of all 
things. He who takes a wide survey of his- 
tory soon learns that every day is a day of the 
Lord, and does not take too seriously the esti- 



140 SOME ASPECTS OF 

mate of contemporaries when they judge the 
novelties of their own time. But even before 
the war we had come to see that we were living 
in an altogether exceptional and peculiar epoch. 
Civilization had reached a point whose critical 
importance no man could possibly exaggerate. 
Never in the history of the race had there been 
anything comparable with it, and the immediate 
alternative, from the Christian point of view, 
was the universal spread of an absolutely ir- 
religious civilization or the conquest of the 
earth by Jesus Christ. The War, breaking 
forth at such an hour, furiously increased and 
hastened the play of these tremendous forces. 
We in the West suddenly discovered how inti- 
mately the nations to whom we send our mis- 
sionaries are bound in with our own destiny 
in the immediate future. To-day we are dis- 
covering how deeply we are entangled already 
in questions which concern the relations of 
Christian with non-Christian lands; and as 
yet, especially in connection with Japan and 
China, no solution has been found to some of 
the most ominous and fateful problems with 
which the world ever has been confronted. 
New problems are also arising in consequence 
of the threatened withdrawal or restriction of 
Christian education in India by the British 
government. But Christ holds the balance 
between two alternatives. Either this War is 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 141 

the last of the Crusades, preparing the way for 
that reconstruction of the kingdoms of the 
world which Christ called the kingdom of 
Heaven, or else the War is the blast of the last 
trumpet, announcing the dissolution of all 
things and the end of the human story upon 
the earth. Which of these two alternatives is 
to be the true one depends entirely upon the 
measure in which we of this generation can 
bring the principles of Christ to bear upon the 
international politics of our time. He must be 
blind indeed who does not perceive the essential 
connection between statesmanship and foreign 
mission work to-day. 

When we ask for practical applications of 
these ideas, and seek for an answer to the 
immediate question, " What part can you and 
I take in these matters? " the first obvious 
answer leads us back to the League of Nations. 
Here is, ready to our hand, the proposal of a 
machinery which is to be at once universal and 
Christian. Its principles are identical with 
those of Christ, and it is the first time in politics 
that this could be said of any large piece of 
statesmanship. In the League of Nations we 
have seen government baptized with the Holy 
Ghost, returning to the earth, not in the form 
of a world-empire of force, or of a league and 
bond of empires, but as that Kingdom of God 



142 SOME ASPECTS OF 

which Christ lived and died to establish. But, 
as we have seen, Christ, who first preached the 
Kingdom of God upon the earth, is the only 
source of the wisdom that can manage it. The 
universal League o\ Nations is only safe or 
possible or true to its essential idea so long 
as it is universally Christian. No land which 
does not from its heart accept the principles 
for which Christ stood can safely be intrusted 
with a place in this new government of the 
earth. Christianity is presupposed in the 
League from first to last, and the more clearly 
that fact is perceived and acknowledged by 
those who are responsible for its promulgation, 
the sooner we may expect to arrive at some 
stable and permanent condition. In the light 
of all this we can see the urgent need of for- 
eign mission work today. It is already almost 
too late. 

In the second place, we who call ourselves 
Christian nations must take cognizance of 
our own religious point of view. We have said 
that missionary enterprise goes out to foreign 
lands in order to delocalize the gods of the 
heathen; but they who do such things must 
see to it that they have first delocalized their 
own God. As a matter of fact, the God of 
Christian lands has in many cases become identi- 
fied with strictly limited sets of interests there. 
Not confessedly but unconsciously, Christians 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 143 

have often worshiped him as the God of their 
own sect, church, or party, and failed to realize 
that religion has other aspects than those in 
which they may happen to have seen it. Until 
Christendom in all its various branches has 
recognized that the Love of God is as wide as 
humanity and all human interests, and that 
the compassions of God and the appreciations 
of Christ are over every man and all that con- 
cerns him throughout all the countries of the 
earth, we shall not be fit to achieve the Chris- 
tianization of the world. 

In the third place, a new call is made upon 
us to take note of the other agents that are 
operating in the foreign field besides those of 
Christian missions. The missionary enterprise 
must now with a new thoroughness adjust its 
relations with international politics, industry, 
and commerce. We must realize that the mer- 
chant and the diplomatist are missionaries 
wherever they go, spreading the service either 
of God or of the devil across the lands; and we 
must begin our attempt at the influencing of 
the ends of the earth in our own offices, and be- 
side our own firesides and cradles, from which 
these missionaries are to go forth. No man 
should be allowed to leave a Christian land for 
any sort of service in a land as yet unchristian- 
ized until his mind has been imbued with such 
high, humane, and yet sensible ideas of the 



144 SOME ASPECTS OF 

relations of men of different civilizations, as 
will insure that his work and influence abroad 
will be worthy of the Christian name and will 
forward the Christian life. 

Lastly, it must be borne in mind that there 
is demanded of us all a higher appreciation, 
not only of man as man, apart from his na- 
tionality and antecedents, but a higher appre- 
ciation also of Jesus Christ. There are subtle 
and mysterious connections between the various 
parts of the Kingdom of God, and it is probable 
that the prosperity of foreign mission enterprise 
depends directly upon the spiritual condition 
of the land that sends it forth, and especially 
of the professed Christianity of that land. 
It is for us to cherish and to spread abroad a 
profounder belief in the incomparable value of 
Christ our Master for the salvation of the 
world. Our interpretation of Christ may be 
good enough for establishing a life of faith and 
hope in our own souls, and yet may be ill- 
adapted to conquer and to triumph over the 
vast forces of the world. Defective faith of 
this kind is hindering the work of every mis- 
sionary in the foreign field; and every increase 
of faith in the churches of Christendom is 
forwarding the advent of the Kingdom of 
Christ abroad. It is for us more and more to 
read the charter of the Kingdom in the face 
of the King, to believe in Christ so fully and 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 145 

generously that we cannot be contented until 
we have shared his benefits with every human 
being in the world ; and continually to measure 
our estimate of the value of foreign mission 
enterprises, not by the poor standards of ap- 
parent success, but by the debt we personally 
owe to him, and the unspeakable appeal to 
every honest conscience of every opportunity 
of paying that debt. 



146 SOME ASPECTS OF 

CHAPTER VI 

Britain to America 

The occasion on which these lectures were 
delivered in the spring of last year was one which 
brought to the lecturer a unique opportunity 
of coming in contact with many different types 
of university life in the United States. From 
Harvard and Yale he passed to universities in 
the Middle West — Delaware, DePauw, and 
Cincinnati — and everywhere met with the 
same abundant welcome, and felt the same keen 
delight in the contact with every one of these 
varied spirits of university life. To a British 
man, traveling thus over large areas of the 
States, the first feeling is that of an almost 
incredible hospitality and kindness. He is 
welcomed personally and taken for granted as a 
friend before he is even known ; and, to use a 
colloquial phrase, " it is up to him " to justify 
the frank trust and confidence which have been 
extended to him in so generous a welcome. 
Yet there seemed to be indications of some- 
thing deeper and more significant than even 
this instinctive good will, which is so characteris- 
tic of the American reception of strangers. 
The political and commercial relations between 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 147 

our two lands offer some of the most complex 
and even dangerous problems in the world. 
Yet he who travels among the university circles 
of America cannot fail to discover a tendency 
toward a closer union than has for many years 
subsisted between our countries, a new fondness 
for the old land and a new willingness to meet 
cordially in frank approach. To-day I wish 
to give you some sort of an idea of how an 
average British man thinks about all this. 
Some of my impressions may be erroneous and 
others disproportioned, but they are impres- 
sions founded upon a pretty wide contact with 
American men and minds, and I give you them 
to-day in perfect frankness for what they are 
worth. 

First of all I think you will agree with 
me that it is time for us to go back beyond the 
American Revolutionary War in order to find 
the origins of things. After all, that war was 
not the beginning of the heavens and the earth, 
and much had happened before its lamentable 
outbreak. Certain books seem to have been 
written as if history began in 1776, or at least 
as if the history of the relations between 
America and Britain began then. Let us 
remember that long before that war tore us 
asunder we were united in a common fight for 
freedom. The liberties of Europe, guaranteed 
in the Magna Charta, in the establishment of 



148 SOME ASPECTS OF 

the great guilds, and in all the early battles 
of its age-long struggle, were common to us 
both. The foundations of freedom were laid 
by your fathers and ours, fighting and working 
side by side, and the instincts which prompted 
them and the ideals which appealed to them 
remain the deepest instincts and the highest 
ideals of men of good will on both sides of the 
Atlantic. The seas were wider then than they 
are now and more estranging, and men who 
crossed them became alienated from those who 
remained on the other side, through lack of 
contact and the impossibility of frequent 
interchange of the ideas under whose dominance 
life is carried on. When the Revolutionary 
War broke out, it was not a war between our 
two peoples at all. The finest intellect and 
the vast mass of the conscience and opinion of 
the British people were entirely against it. 
Burke was against it, and so was Pitt. It is 
not fair that it should be remembered as an 
expression of the mind of my nation, although 
it was waged in my nation's name. 

There have followed after it one hundred and 
fifty years of varied history in both our lands. 
In one sense we were too far away from one 
another, and in another we were too near akin; 
and the result was a tendency toward misun- 
derstanding which has poisoned much of our 
relations with each other. We have often 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 149 

irritated one another and we have often misun- 
derstood one another. In the Civil War the 
British attitude to America was such as to 
satisfy neither the North nor the South, and 
such instances as that of the Alabama, and later 
on that in connection with Venezuela, were 

' fraught with terrible danger. Even in the 
present war in its earlier phases, such matters 
as our blacklisting arrangements, our cen- 
sorship, and our searching of ships, were bound 
to cause friction of a dangerous kind. When 
later on you discovered how necessary some of 
these arrangements were, not to our safety 
only but to your own, I think they may be 
said to have passed completely out of mind. 
When, after the long and inevitable time of 
waiting, you were able at last to come into the 
war unitedly and effectively, not only these 
recent estrangements, but all others that had 

.' gone before them, were wiped out forever in 

\ our brotherhood in arms. 

The debt was mutual and we have both paid 
in full. We got our chance first, and I think you 
will acknowledge that we took it satisfactorily. 
We were called upon to give the lead, and with- 
out calculating chances we sent our ' contempt- 
ible little army' across to the field. You know 
what our navy did for the guarding of the seas, 
the provisioning of troops, and the blockade 
of the enemy. There were times when we 



150 SOME ASPECTS OF 

held the lines against the armies of Germany 
with a single thinly-manned front trench, and 
our guns answered a twenty-four-hours bom- 
bardment with their allowances of half-a-dozen 
shells a day. Yet by the grace of God we held 
the lines. They were your lines as well as ours, 
for, as you know very well to-day, the menace 
which threatened our extinction would not 
have ended there. The final objective of the 
enemy was on your side of the Atlantic. 

Then you got your chance, and you and we, 
cooperating brought the legions of America to 
the European battlefields. I was with your 
first fifty thousand in Gondrecourt in 1917, 
and I wish I could tell you how deep a debt of 
gratitude we owe to them. We had been fight- 
ing for three years, and our dauntless troops 
were hanging on grimly; but the mud had 
entered into the very soul of them, and they 
were weary to death. They went out, led by 
high ideals that flamed like beacons calling 
them to service and to sacrifice for the noblest 
ends that man can achieve or strive after. 
But in dreary monotony and discomfort, re- 
lieved only by periods of deadly and horrible 
danger, men cannot retain the clear vision of 
the ideal lights of life. Your coming relit 
our lamps. We remembered what we were out 
for, and knew again that it was worth while, 
and blessed God for your coming. In 1918, 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 151 

during the most dangerous months of all the 
war, at the time when our undaunted general 
sent forth the one message of the kind that ever 
reached the ears of British soldiers during those 
five years, telling them that our backs were at 
the wall, we stood against the awful floods of 
the enemy. There was no element which so 
strengthened us thus to stand, as our knowledge 
that you were with us, that you would not 
leave us till this thing had been seen through, 
and that, while we had lost well-nigh a million 
men, you would continue the steady stream of 
reenf or cements so long as a man from America 
was required in France. I need not speak to 
you of Chateau Thierry, St. Mihiel, and, above 
all, the Argonne. That was a campaign that 
will be recorded among the great events of 
battle on the earth, a record of which any coun- 
try might well be proud. 

As to the present situation, God knows it is 
complicated enough, and I am not now going to 
discuss it in all its bearings. All that I would 
like to point out is this: that any misunder- 
standings which may arise are due to details 
which are of relatively no importance. Per- 
sonal criticisms of the character and conduct of 
statesmen, in this connection or in that, need 
concern us little, though in an hour like this 
they are apt to confuse the issue by drawing 
away men's attention from the things that really 



152 SOME ASPECTS OF 

and permanently matter. To us you have 
stood for two things which have nothing what- 
ever to do with party politics, either American 
or British. First, you have stood for the essen- 
tial principles of the League of Nations, of 
which I have already spoken to you; and, 
second, you have stood for the return of sim- 
plicity in diplomacy and the end of secret 
treaties. Late events in Italy and in China 
and elsewhere have shown the dire danger of 
the old methods of diplomacy in Europe, and 
especially of secret treaties. It has been said 
that it was inconsistent in the Peace Confer- 
ence to conduct its business in secret while 
objecting to the secrecy of former diplomacy, 
but these are totally different matters. All 
business must be conducted in secret until it 
is ready for presentation to the public. There 
is no possibility of carrying through anything 
anywhere, on a large or small scale, while the 
whole world is looking on and making com- 
ments. To the end of time men who have to 
conduct affairs will be bound to claim that 
they shall do their business among themselves 
alone, until it is ready for complete presenta- 
tion to the criticism and the judgment of the 
public. But the point on which we must insist 
to-day is that it shall be completely presented 
when it is ready for presentation. We de- 
mand that there shall never again be reserva- 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 153 

tions in the publishing of completed diplomacy 
between nations : that never again shall nations, 
knowing only as much as the diplomatists see 
fit to tell them, be suddenly confronted with 
documents which have been kept secret, which 
nullify the effect of the things they knew, and 
which may, indeed, entirely change the situa- 
tion. This aspect of the present day is of 
supreme importance. It is not concerned with 
this or that awkward situation in the history of 
politics. It is a matter of principle, and it has 
introduced fresh and direct moral considera- 
tions into a region which, it must be confessed, 
had previously been singularly devoid of them. 
There have been certain difficulties of a 
more or less political character which have 
tended to foster suspicion and hesitation into 
the mutual approach between us. From the 
British side there were misgivings, mostly of a 
rather vague kind, founded upon the different 
point of view which characterized American 
as contrasted with British mentality. Our 
whole history, and the conditions of our na- 
tional life, had in some respects put us apart, 
and it was impossible but that we should view 
certain questions that arose, in very different 
lights. Some British men were afraid that 
America would demand changes, or would seek 
to produce them, which we were not prepared 
to make. Especially was this the case in regard 



154 SOME ASPECTS OF 

to the interpretation of democracy. On the 
whole it may be safely said that the American 
interpretation of democracy demands greater 
liberty for the collective state, and allows less 
to the private individual, than the British 
interpretation of it does. This radical differ- 
ence is of very far-reaching importance, and 
it will prevent the two lands from ever adopting 
identical institutions in many things. Every- 
one who has traveled in both countries will 
recognize many details which would be only 
possible in Britain, and others which must 
be equally confined to America. All this, and 
the traditions and sentiments which cling 
around the memory of a throne on the one side 
and of a republic on the other, gave cause 
for certain anxieties in British minds. It is 
with profound thankfulness that one can view 
the situation to-day, perplexed and difficult 
as it is. You have not demanded of us im- 
possible modifications. You have made al- 
lowances for our differing institutions, and large 
numbers of matters which seemed fraught with 
danger have passed away in & quite astonishing 
unanimity. 

On the other hand, there were difficulties 
that seemed to threaten from the American 
point of view. Your soldiers were brought in 
contact with the visible greatness of the British 
Empire, and a great many of them realized for 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 155 

the first time how great it is. It is not to be 
wondered at that American men should have 
hesitated, lest they were being called in to 
rehabilitate the British Empire in the hour of 
its danger, and thus to become accessories to 
British greatness. It was quite reasonable 
that you should hesitate before accepting so 
ambiguous a situation. 

To all this, however, there is a clear and 
simple reply, and in virtue of that reply the 
threatened dangers entirely disappear. It is 
true that you did come to our aid at a moment 
when the resources of the British Empire were 
taxed to their very utmost point, and we shall 
be eternally grateful to you for coming. Be- 
lieve me, we know the value of the thing you 
did, and never till the end of time shall it be 
forgotten. Yet I do not think that any of us 
mistook the meaning of your coming, or ac- 
cepted it in any sense of which you would not 
fully approve. The cause for which you and 
we alike were fighting was so great as to 
swallow up the consideration of the fortunes 
of our individual nations altogether. It 
was the cause of world-wide democracy and 
freedom, of eternal humanity and righteous- 
ness. These are greater than the British Em- 
pire. They are greater than the American 
Republic. They are as great as the human 
race itself. They are the rescript of the will 



156 SOME ASPECTS OF 

of God for man, in which you and we are 
but humble and honored instruments. 

Then, again, it must be remembered that the 
British Empire has understood itself in an 
increasingly democratic sense. There was a 
time when imperialism and jingoism were 
practically synonymous, but that time has long 
gone by. Even then, in the early days of the 
empire, the true measure of its greatness was 
the help and benefit it brought to the lands 
which it included; and while our past history 
is no more free from blemishes and immorali- 
ties than the history of other countries, yet we 
can truly say that, upon the whole, the object 
pursued by Britain in other lands has not been 
to exploit them but to benefit them. It may 
be replied that in many cases they did not de- 
sire our benefits, and that it is tyrannous to 
force even benefits upon lands that do not 
desire them. To this the reply has been made 
by the empire itself. Had its members viewed 
the mother country in this light, they would 
not have come to us from every region where 
our flag has flown, nor have laid down their 
lives by thousands in willing sacrifice for the 
safety and the victory of British arms. 

Now, when the war is over, we are in such a 
welter of politics that it is impossible to see 
very clearly any distance into the future, but 
one thing is absolutely certain, and that is that 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 157 

our relations with all our colonies are being 
democratized in a fashion which has never 
been seen on earth as yet. They will share our 
councils upon all crucial and important matters 
as they never yet have shared them. The 
whole conception of empire will more clearly 
found itself upon generous and altruistic aims, 
and will more definitely disclaim any notion of 
exploiting the earth for selfish ends. 

From the point of view of religion there has 
all along been a very great deal in common to 
our two countries. The Puritan stock was 
certainly as strong a leaven as ever was hidden 
in the lump of any national life, and to this 
day, even among non-religious Americans, one 
can see the effect of it in many respects. On 
the other hand, America has faced the world 
during all her history along distinctively practi- 
cal and modern lines, and you have not been 
without a race of religious teachers who have 
applied the same principles to their religious 
thinking, and founded schools of distinctively 
humanist thought. These two schools, side 
by side, have corresponded with the narrower 
and broader schools of religious teaching in the 
old country, but until recently there has been 
wanting that most characteristic of all our Brit- 
ish religious institutions, the fusion of the two 
in a humanist evangelicalism. To-day there 



158 SOME ASPECTS OF 

appear to be signs that this is coming in America 
also, and that the present hour, with its mani- 
fold upheavals, is that in which it is to appear. 
In such an hour men feel the necessity for 
getting away from formulae and words, hallowed 
by custom, but no longer applicable. In 
their search for reality they seek to combine 
all the results of modern scientific methods 
with a religious earnestness equal to that of 
the older and narrower days. The war seems 
to be fusing the religious spirit of the United 
States of America into something which is 
at the same time broadly human and passion- 
ately evangelical. 

These are all interesting aspects of matters 
political and religious in which we differ and 
agree, but the real question between us, after 
all, is one of temperament. Alliances are all 
very good, and are sometimes urgently neces- 
sary, as they were in the late war. Differences 
of opinion may be reconciled as time throws 
new light upon old questions. But the real 
question deep in the heart of all our relations is, 
Do we love one another or do we not? 
What is the real feeling of your land to mine, 
and mine to yours? The chief dangers lie 
in suspicions and misunderstandings which 
hold back the affection of nations and leave 
them apt to quarrel. Even commercial differ- 
ences are not so dangerous as temperamental 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 159 

ones. Rival traders understand one another, 
and although there may be sore feeling over 
this transaction or that involving loss on one 
side or the other, yet in the give and take of 
commerce a modus Vivendi may be arrived at. 
But who shall bring together the differing souls 
of the Oxford Don and the Buckeye or the 
Hoosier? The one is reticent beyond belief, 
and camouflaged at every moment under masses 
of pretended indifference: the other, frank and 
hearty as God's mountain winds, warm-hearted, 
approachable, and approaching. These races 
talk a different language, and they think 
far differing thoughts. Now, however, all 
these men have fought side by side, and the 
incidents of the long war will not be forgotten 
in this generation. There is an island in the 
west of Scotland, the Isle of Islay, famous in 
the annals of the war for two great shipwrecks. 
When from the wreck of the Tuscania the 
corpses of the American dead were washed 
ashore, a flag was needed under which they 
might be borne to their burial. On one of the 
bodies there was found a silk handkerchief in 
the pattern of the stars and stripes. The 
girls of the island brought out all they pos- 
sessed of garments, red, white and blue, and 
after working all night they finished at the dawn 
of day a gigantic American flag, under whose 
cover the bodies were laid to rest. On the same 



160 SOME ASPECTS OF 

island the Otranto was driven ashore, and young 
boys from the cottages plunged time and again 
into the raging waters, until they had saved 
many of the drowning. It is by such things 
that men live, by such things that nations are 
born ; and there is more significance in one such 
tale as these than in many treaties. The great 
question of the hour is how we shall preserve 
through the difficult times of peace that unity 
of heart which, in so many instances, the War 
has evoked. It was a day of great emotion 
when Londoners saw the American flag hoisted 
for the first time on Westminster Tower, and 
many of us discovered then the value of the 
union of the English-speaking peoples. We had 
been talking about the League of Nations and 
doing our best to secure it for the world, but 
then we began to realize that the League of 
Nations has a center which is already and im- 
mediately achievable. If Britain and America 
stand together, a united power is formed which 
can absolutely dominate the world in the 
interests of freedom and of high ideals. Other 
nations may for a time secede, but no one of 
them, nor any group of them, is strong enough 
to stand against our combination. We are the 
central steel bands that reenforce the concrete 
of the League of Nations, and no greater re- 
sponsibility was ever laid upon man, than ours 
is to-day in virtue of that fact. 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 161 

When we ask what all this practically means, 
and what Britain asks of America at the present 
hour, I am reminded of that former visit, three 
years ago, when I answered that question by 
the request for men and money and ships. 
These things you supplied in profuse abundance, 
and your timely lavishness brought the war to 
a speedy termination. Thank God, the need 
for these is over, and now our requests are 
different. 

In the first place, we ask for opportunities of 
mutual knowledge and understanding. With 
the ocean between them, men and nations will 
inevitably fall asunder. When we look into 
each other's eyes, and come to know each 
other's hearts, we soon find how much good will 
there is beneath whatever seeming estrange- 
ment. Men of all sorts, and in all possible 
capacities, should cross the Atlantic at the 
present time — politicians, business men, minis- 
ters of religion, professors and students from 
the universities. The more exchanges we have 
among these and all other classes of the com- 
munity, the better for the world; and every 
organization for mutual exchange ought to 
be regarded as a matter of high politics and 
encouraged to the utmost. 

In the second place, the rearrangement of 
the world will have to be organized in many 
quarters under the system of mandatory 



162 SOME ASPECTS OF 

protectorates, in which stronger nations under- 
take the responsibility for weaker ones during 
the present stress. In many quarters in 
America there is adverse criticism of the idea 
of America interfering further than she can 
help, in European politics. Far be it from me 
to venture to express any opinion as to the 
Monroe Doctrine, or to give any advice about 
it to an American audience, but I do venture 
with great earnestness to plead that you will 
not withdraw from cooperation with us in 
some of the regions where we have been fight- 
ing together, but will take your share with the 
rest of us in mandatory powers. There are 
certain regions where you can do this as no other 
nation can. In the Balkans, in Macedonia, in 
Constantinople, and in Armenia it may be 
said without fear of contradiction that no 
European nation enjoys such prestige as you 
do. Your whole contact with these lands has 
been of the missionary kind. The things which 
have introduced you to that part of the East 
are your mission schools and Red Cross hospi- 
tals. In the confusion of European affairs 
which prevails at present, no European nation 
could accept mandatory powers in any of these 
regions without some risk of suspicion of 
territorial or other desires and ambitions of a 
selfish kind. No such suspicion would attach 
to you, and I do very earnestly trust that you 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 163 

will see your way to take some such share as 
this in the work of reorganizing the world, and 
administering certain territories. You would 
not wish to give advice and yet withdraw from 
the responsibility of acting on it. You have 
given us much advice. You have advised some 
of the wisest and noblest courses that the world 
has ever seen advocated, but that advice of yours 
involved high responsibilities and serious dan- 
gers. May we not count upon you to see this 
thing through, and to stand side by side with 
us as we seek to carry out into practice those 
ideals for which we owe so large a debt to 
you? 

In the third place, there is the whole social 
problem with its enormous industrial and 
economic complications. In the backwash of 
the war the world is restless, and all that 
seething mass of dissatisfaction and sense of 
injustice which has been smoldering for many 
years has burst suddenly into flame. On both 
sides of the Atlantic it is now realized that in 
many respects the social order is going to change. 
At such an hour it is of supreme importance 
that you and we should stand and face these 
things together. No Christian conscience is 
satisfied with the social order as it has been or 
actually is. On the other hand, it will take 
all the wisdom and all the conscience of our 
united statesmanship and experience to create 



164 SOME ASPECTS OF 

a social order founded upon justice and stable 
for the future. 

In the fourth place, we ask you for the 
precious gift of your idealism. Perhaps the 
greatest contrast between America and Britain 
lies just here. We are both idealists, but we 
differ in this, that while you are always hitching 
your wagon to a star, you always tell us the 
name of the star and point to its guiding light. 
We too have stars for our wagons, but it is a 
national point of honor to pretend that we have 
none! When you came to us in the day of our 
distress and proclaimed to the war- weary men 
in Europe the ideals that had brought you 
across the sea, we may not have received you 
always with effusion; but in our hearts we 
loved that star, and blessed God for those 
who reminded us of the things which had 
brought us also out. A British man cannot 
express his ideals for himself, but, in the stout 
heart of him, he is grateful to any one who will 
express them for him. We are a peculiar 
people, and we are apt to be offensive when we 
meet with anything in the way of spread-eagle, 
or conscious rectitude which is not backed by 
deeds. But, if you proclaim your ideals, you 
also make them good, and that makes all th e 
difference. We can remember the boasting 
of the Germans, and the high-sounding words 
that were meant to terrify the world. These 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 165 

words sound contemptible enough now, when 
we remember the midnight flight of the em- 
peror who so freely used them, and the sur- 
render of that fleet which was to do such mighty 
things. You made good your ideals and you 
rekindled ours, once again reminding the world 
that ideals are the real powers in life, the real 
makers of history. These things you did in 
war, and we beseech you to continue to do them 
in peace. Let us, each in our own peculiar 
fashion, live consciously for the highest things 
we know, and dedicate ourselves to such living. 
Your franker expression will find deep echoes 
in our hearts and consciences, and will tend to 
keep us up to our best. 

If I am not mistaken, it is the case that the 
main lesson of your own Civil War, the lesson 
which after fifty years seems to hold its essential 
meaning, is this, that freedom and unity must 
necessarily go together. When kindred men 
fall apart, their separation impairs the freedom 
of both parties. If that was seen in the rela- 
tions of the North and South in 1861, how much 
more evident is it to-day, upon the large scale 
of East and West? In such an hour one sees 
clearly the supreme value and necessity for 
this high union of hearts. We are both out for 
democracy, although we define it in somewhat 
different terms, and in this ultimate ideal and 
aim we are united. It is lesser things that 



166 SOME ASPECTS OF 

divide us; the great things, the ideal things, 
continually unite our lands and hearts. 

Think of the bonds that bind us, and then 
ask who shall separate us who are bound with 
such bonds. To begin with there is the bond 
of blood. And although you have fused the 
blood of many nations into the great American 
people, yet you have managed so to absorb it 
as to produce a new race, enriched by contribu- 
tions from all the world, but still keeping for its 
main characteristic that democratic and freedom- 
loving quality for which we and you together 
stood throughout the struggles of early centu- 
ries. We have also a common language, and 
that counts for something. It must be re- 
membered, indeed, that many of the bloodiest 
wars have been fought between men speaking 
the same tongue. Yet, if the union be truly 
one of hearts, we shall be able the better to 
consolidate it and to understand one another 
because we need no interpreter. It is true that 
words have different values in American usage 
from those they bear in Britain, and that will 
always tend toward misunderstandings between 
unfamiliar representatives of each land. The 
need is all the greater .for that system of ex- 
changes for which I have already asked that in 
this literal sense we may the more fully under- 
stand one another's speech. 

There are other bonds, however, greater 



INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 167 

and more effective than these to-day. The 
bond of a common service to the world, which 
sprang from a common conscience, and was 
sealed in the blood of a common sacrifice, may 
well provide us with a common purpose as we 
go forth into the future days. Only let us keep 
clear before our eyes, let us write deep upon our 
conscience and our will, the supreme necessity 
for understanding, mutual allowance, and agree- 
ment. It is the greatest day that ever dawned 
on earth, and the most fateful hour of that day 
has now struck. Its opportunity and its 
responsibility are almost terrifying to con- 
template. The fate of the world's future hangs 
mainly upon our unity. The blood shed in the 
past by many of the noblest of our sons demands 
it. It demands an intelligent grasp of the 
significance and of the necessity for our fellow- 
ship, and a passionate determination on the 
part of us all to retain and further it. For 
high ends in his own great purpose God has 
made one again at last. That which God hath 
joined together let not man put asunder. 



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